A time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) flaw in the illumos data-link pseudo-driver (dld) affects handling of the DLDIOC_GETMACPROP and DLDIOC_SETMACPROP ioctls on /dev/dld. drv_ioc_prop_common() in usr/src/uts/common/io/dld/dld_drv.c copies the dld_ioc_macprop_t ioctl header in once to read its pr_valsize field, sizes and allocates a kernel heap buffer from that value, and then copies the full request in a second time from the same unprivileged user address. A concurrent thread can enlarge pr_valsize between the two copyins, so the second copyin and the subsequent property handling write beyond the end of the undersized allocation and corrupt the kernel heap. An unprivileged local user, including one confined to a non-global zone that owns a datalink, can trigger this to panic the system. The resulting kernel heap corruption may be usable for further compromise.
Weakness
A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc().
Potential Mitigations
- Use automatic buffer overflow detection mechanisms that are offered by certain compilers or compiler extensions. Examples include: the Microsoft Visual Studio /GS flag, Fedora/Red Hat FORTIFY_SOURCE GCC flag, StackGuard, and ProPolice, which provide various mechanisms including canary-based detection and range/index checking.
- D3-SFCV (Stack Frame Canary Validation) from D3FEND [REF-1334] discusses canary-based detection in detail.
- Run or compile the software using features or extensions that randomly arrange the positions of a program’s executable and libraries in memory. Because this makes the addresses unpredictable, it can prevent an attacker from reliably jumping to exploitable code.
- Examples include Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) [REF-58] [REF-60] and Position-Independent Executables (PIE) [REF-64]. Imported modules may be similarly realigned if their default memory addresses conflict with other modules, in a process known as “rebasing” (for Windows) and “prelinking” (for Linux) [REF-1332] using randomly generated addresses. ASLR for libraries cannot be used in conjunction with prelink since it would require relocating the libraries at run-time, defeating the whole purpose of prelinking.
- For more information on these techniques see D3-SAOR (Segment Address Offset Randomization) from D3FEND [REF-1335].