Non-control-data attacks are realistic threats
SSYM'05 Proceedings of the 14th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 14
Information Assurance: Dependability and Security in Networked Systems
Information Assurance: Dependability and Security in Networked Systems
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This paper experimentally evaluates and models the error-caused security vulnerabilities and the resulting security violations of two Linux kernel firewalls: IPChains and Netfilter. There are two major aspects to this work: to conduct extensive error injection experiments on the Linux kernel and to quatify the possibility of error-caused security violations using a SAN model. The error injection experiments show that about 2% of errors injected into the firewall code segment cause security vulnerabilities. Two types of error-caused security vulnerabilities are distinguished: temporaty, which disappear when the error dissappears, and permanent, which persist even after the error is removed, as long as the system is not rebooted. Results from simulating the SAN model indicate that under an error rate of .01 error/day during a 1-year period in a networked system protected by 20 firewalls, 2 machines (on the average) will experience security violations. This indicates that error-caused security vulnerabilities can be a non-neglibible source of a security threats to a highly secure system.