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Commodity operating system (OS) kernels, such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD, are susceptible to numerous security vulnerabilities. Their monolithic design gives successful attackers complete access to all application data and system resources. Shielding systems such as InkTag, Haven, and Virtual Ghost protect sensitive application data from compromised OS kernels. However, such systems are still vulnerable to side-channel attacks. Worse yet, compromised OS kernels can leverage their control over privileged hardware state to exacerbate existing side channels; recent work has shown that a compromised OS kernel can steal entire documents via side channels. This paper presents defenses against page table and last-level cache (LLC) side-channel attacks launched by a compromised OS kernel. Our page table defenses restrict the OS kernel’s ability to read and write page table pages and defend against page allocation attacks, and our LLC defenses utilize the Intel Cache Allocation Technology along with memory isolation primitives. We proto- type our solution in a system we call Apparition, building on an optimized version of Virtual Ghost. Our evaluation shows that our side-channel defenses add 1% to 18% (with up to 86% for one application) overhead to the optimized Virtual Ghost (relative to the native kernel) on real-world applications.
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Detecting TCP/IP Connections via IPID Hash Collisions
Abstract We present a novel attack for detecting the presence of an active TCP connection between a remote Linux server and an arbitrary client machine. The attack takes advantage of side-channels present in the Linux kernel’s handling of the values used to populate an IPv4 packet’s IPID field and applies to kernel versions of 4.0 and higher. We implement and test this attack and evaluate its real world effectiveness and performance when used on active connections to popular web servers. Our evaluation shows that the attack is capable of correctly detecting the IP-port 4-tuple representing an active TCP connection in 84% of our mock attacks. We also demonstrate how the attack can be used by the middle onion router in a Tor circuit to test whether a given client is connected to the guard entry node associated with a given circuit. In addition we discuss the potential issues an attacker would face when attempting to scale it to real world attacks, as well as possible mitigations against the attack. Our attack does not exhaust any global resource, and therefore challenges the notion that there is a direct one-to-one connection between shared, limited resources and non-trivial network side-channels. This means that simply enumerating global shared resources and considering the ways in which they can be exhausted will not suffice for certifying a kernel TCP/IP network stack to be free of privacy risk side-channels.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1801613
- PAR ID:
- 10166681
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
- Volume:
- 2019
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2299-0984
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 311 to 328
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2019-0071
