Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR Presentation by Eric Newberry and Youssef Tobah Paper by Dmitry Evtyushkin, Dmitry Ponomarev, and Nael Abu-Ghazaleh 1

Motivation Buffer overflow attacks modify the control flow of a program ● Exploit unsafe writes to overwrite the stack pointers ○ Function returns to the location specified by the attacker ○ Numerous security measures proposed to counteract: ● ○ No eXecute (NX) page bit - prevents non-code memory pages from being executed Address space location randomization (ASLR) - Randomizes some bits in virtual addresses ○ ● If we can recover the randomized ASLR bits, may make this less difficult Can we exploit a hardware side-channel to do this? ● 2

Goals of the Attack Recover the randomized (ASLR) bits of the virtual memory address by exploiting ● (and measuring) collision delays in the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) ● Do so to recover both userland ASLR and kernel ASLR (KASLR) bits Then attacker can proceed with the buffer overflow attack ● However, attacker needs to be able to do this using an unprivileged process ● No special privileges ○ No memory disclosures ○ 3

Branch Target Buffer (BTB) Evtyushkin et al, “Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR” 4

The Attack in a Nutshell Multiple addresses can map to the same location in the BTB ● On Intel Haswell processors, cache tag is only a portion of the upper-order address bits, while ○ virtual addresses are 48 bits Attacker process causes collisions in the BTB using branch instructions ● ● This increases latency of the attacker process, as its previously-loaded BTB entries were overwritten by the victim From these latency measurements, we can significantly narrow down (or guess ● outright) the ASLR bits of the victim process or the kernel 5

Attacking Other Userland Processes Attacker loads some code into memory at a location where the upper order ● address bits of the attacker code match targeted code in the victim ● Send signal to victim process to execute targeted code Victim will execute, overwriting attacker’s entry in the BTB ● When attacker resumes, it will execute its branch and measure execution time ● If branch took longer than usual to run, likely indicates a BTB collision ● ○ Only causes slowdown if target addresses of branches in attacker and victim differ Intel states incorrect BTB prediction causes 8 cycle IF bubble ○ ○ Average measured time over multiple attempts for increased accuracy Spy T2 Spy T1 Victim T2 55.76 cycles 69.38 (+11.12) cycles Victim T1 64.93 (+9.17) cycles 58.26 6 Evtyushkin et al, “Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR”

Attacking the Kernel Kernel utilizes same virtual address space as ● attacker process ● We know that the first 18 bits of the kernel address (out of 48) are fixed Can’t utilize same virtual address as the kernel, ● but using only the upper-order portions of the last 31 bits for the BTB tag gets around this issue (at least on Intel Haswell processors) Therefore, the attack can be done in a manner ● similar to userland processes Evtyushkin et al, “Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR” ● However, it’s easier to run targeted code in the kernel due to syscalls 7

KASLR in Linux KASLR generates random bits during boot ● Determines offset for physical memory location of kernel ○ Same offset is applied to virtual memory ○ Only 9 bits randomized ● 8 Evtyushkin et al, “Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR”

Recovering KASLR Bits Locate branch instruction in kernel to execute ● List potential addresses for branch, and at each one ● ○ Allocate buffer Load with code containing branch and time-measurement instruction ○ ○ Activate kernel branch Activate spy branch ○ ○ Measure time taken to execute spy branch 9

KASLR Recovery Results Experiment performed using ● ‘open’ system call ● Intentionally provide incorrect file name Increases speed ○ ○ Reduces noise 512 possible addresses for branch ● 50 measurements collected at each ○ address Attack done in 60 milliseconds ○ Evtyushkin et al, “Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR” 10

Recovering Userland ASLR Bits Similar to KASLR bit recovery ● Targets victim process with branch ○ instruction Makes list of potential addresses ○ Allocates buffer at address ○ Forces victim to call branch and ○ use BTB Spy runs jump multiple times and ○ measures time Measures again with spy branching ○ to different target Evtyushkin et al, “Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR” 11

ASLR Co-residency For KASLR, every process has kernel ● For userland ASLR, attack needs to ensure co-residency to get BTB collisions ● Two methods to ensure co-residency ● Evtyushkin et al, “Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR” Evtyushkin et al, “Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR” Load all cores with dummy processes, except core with Have spy run on every core victim and spy 12

Experimental Results Not all ASLR bits retrieved ● Bits 12 to 40 randomized ○ Only 18 bits used in BTB ○ Checking 100 addresses took ● about 1 second Further optimizations could improve ○ performance Evtyushkin et al, “Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR” 13

Technical Insights ASLR vulnerability exposed ● Potential mitigation techniques proposed ● ● Software solutions Finer grained ASLR ○ Fuzzing timing measurements ○ For KASLR, randomize higher order bits for every process launch ○ Hardware Solutions ● ○ Full virtual address for accessing BTB For kernel, add secret value to BTB hash function ○ ■ Use different hash value for each process Flush BTB on context switches ○ ○ Each BTB could be marked with process ID 14

Related Work Other side channel attacks ● Cache side channels (many works) ○ Branch predictor attack to get secret keys (Aciicmez et al) ○ Branch predictor attack to build inter-process communication channel (Evtyushkin et al) ○ Other ASLR work ● Brute-force attacks (Shacham et al) ○ ○ Memory disclosure attacks (Roglia et al) Attacking KASLR by causing cache collisions b/w kernel and userland processes (Hund et al) ○ ○ TLB manipulation attack to reveal kernel memory pages (Hund et al) BTB attacks are simpler and do not rely on noisy cache measurements ● 15

Conclusion By causing collisions in the Branch Target Buffer (BTB), we can recover (or at ● least narrow down) ASLR bits ● This mechanism is extremely effective for both userland processes and the kernel The authors proposed multiple mechanisms, both in software and hardware, to ● close this side channel and prevent ASLR bits from being recovered 16

Discussion Points For userland ASLR attack, not all random bits are known by end of attack. Is this ● acceptable? ○ Essentially reduces difficulty of a brute force attack Is the method of maximizing process calls on all cores but one sufficiently ● stealthy? ● Is there a software mechanism that could be developed to detect this attack? This would be useful on older systems designed before this side channel was discovered. ○ One of the mitigations the authors propose is finer-grained randomization of ● ASLR, even going as far as to do this at an instruction-level granularity. Would this cause any difficulties for developers? Particularly during debugging? ○ 17