Cambridge Researcher Breaks OpenBSD Systrace

An anonymous reader writes "University of Cambridge researcher Robert Watson has published a paper at the First USENIX Workshop On Offensive Technology in which he describes serious vulnerabilities in OpenBSD's Systrace, Sudo, Sysjail, the TIS GSWTK framework, and CerbNG. The technique is also effective against many commercially available anti-virus systems. His slides include sample exploit code that bypasses access control, virtualization, and intrusion detection in under 20 lines of C code consisting solely of memcpy() and fork(). Sysjail has now withdrawn their software, recommending against any use, and NetBSD has disabled Systrace by default in their upcoming release."

Comments

Re:SELinux and the same ...

[afidel]

I wonder what the performance penalty would be for thunking to kernel space would on every such operation would be? If it was well implemented I would guess it would be minimal since you could just pass the call off to the called kernel object directly. I also wonder what if any security vulnerabilities would be exposed by moving that extra code in kernel space. I know for the TrustedBSD tools it would be minimal due to their strict code checking policies, but for other systems having this much extra code in kernel space might be a risk.