Assessing the Tux Strength: Part 1 – Userspace Memory Protection

“This is a first of a series of articles describing different
security mechanisms and exploitation mitigation techniques
available in Linux environments and their use across various Linux
distributions. This article focuses solely on userspace
protections. Subsequent articles will focus on specific software
such as web browsers or network daemons and their security exposure
as well as additional kernel security mechanisms and frameworks
that are available.

“Memory corruption attacks are still a very common way to
compromise a modern computer system. However, the once basic
techniques of buffer overflows have evolved into more sophisticated
memory corruption attacks and at the same time the mechanisms to
protect the integrity of processes and system memory has also
improved.

“Probably every attack mitigation technique that has been
developed over time to mitigate memory corruption exploits can be
implemented and used in one form or another in a Linux operating
system. Many people argue that some of the protection mechanisms
are more effective than others, for example by mitigating against a
larger number of different attacks. Furthermore, a number of them
arguably have a performance impact on the system and could also
produce some challenges in terms of compilation of the specific
software as well as in ensuring compatibility with the rest of the
system.”

Complete Story