Exploit Methods/Userspace data usage

Details

Sometimes an attacker won't be able to control the instruction pointer directly, but they will be able to redirect the dereference a structure or other pointer. In these cases, it is easiest to aim at malicious structures that have been built in userspace to perform the exploitation.

Examples

• cred structure
• fake kernel stack
• Bad casts

Mitigations

• hardware segmentation: SMAP (x86), PAN (arm, arm64), Domains (arm)
• emulate memory segmentation via separate page tables, PCID, etc (e.g. PaX_UDEREF)

Right now, the upstream options available for PAN are:

CPU		Feature Name
ARM	v7 32-bit non-LPAE	CONFIG_CPU_SW_DOMAIN_PAN
	v7 32-bit LPAE	CONFIG_CPU_TTBR0_PAN (Catalin's series)
	v8 32-bit	CONFIG_CPU_TTBR0_PAN
	v8 64-bit	nothing
	v8.1	hardware PAN
x86	pre-late-Broadwell	nothing
	Broadwell+	hardware PAN (SMAP)
powerpc		nothing?
MIPS		nothing?