Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Kernel Hardening

[Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 1:17 PM, James Morris <jmorris@namei.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, 24 Aug 2015, James Bottomley wrote:
>>
>>> Um, forgive me for being dense, but doesn't fixing the flaws stop their
>>> exploitation?  In any event, Hardening means "reducing the attack
>>> surface" and that encompasses both active and passive means (including
>>> actual bug fixing).
>>
>> Hardening is mitigating those flaws.  You'll never find every flaw, but
>> you can mitigate against entire classes of flaws being exploited.
>>
>>> >  The
>>> > hardening the kernel needs is about taking away exploitation tools,
>>> > not killing bugs. (Though killing bugs is still great.)
>>>
>>> It's both.  One of the old standards for attacking C code was buffer
>>> overruns.  Remove those via detection tools and you reduce the attack
>>> surface.
>>
>> In this case, we're specifically talking about hardening the kernel to
>> mitigate exploitation of flaws.  Kernel self-protection may be a better
>> term (and recently surfaced in an NSA presentation at LSS: p.23 of
>>
>> http://kernsec.org/files/lss2015/lss2015_selinuxinandroidlollipopandm_smalley.pdf
>
> Yup. Using "kernel self-protection" cuts right to the point. I'm in
> debt to Stephen for finding the right marketing term for "kernel
> memory corruption vulnerability exploit mitigation". :)

pageexec informs me he used the term earlier...
https://pax.grsecurity.net/docs/PaXTeam-H2HC12-PaX-kernel-self-protection.pdf

Regardless, you're all awesome.

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook
Chrome OS Security