Paper Info
Title
Pex: A Permission Check Analysis Framework For Linux Kernel
Abstract
Permission checks play an essential role in operating system security by providing access control to privileged functionalities. However, it is particularly challenging for kernel developers to correctly apply new permission checks and to scalably verify the soundness of existing checks due to the large code base and complexity of the kernel. In fact, Linux kernel contains millions of lines of code with hundreds of permission checks, and even worse its complexity is fast-growing.This paper presents PeX, a static Permission check error detector for LinuX, which takes as input a kernel source code and reports any missing, inconsistent, and redundant permission checks. PeX uses KIRIN (Kernel InteRface based Indirect call aNalysis), a novel, precise, and scalable indirect call analysis technique, leveraging the common programming paradigm used in kernel abstraction interfaces. Over the interprocedural control flow graph built by KIRIN, PeX automatically identifies all permission checks and infers the mappings between permission checks and privileged functions. For each privileged function, PeX examines all possible paths to the function to check if necessary permission checks are correctly enforced before it is called.We evaluated PeX on the latest stable Linux kernel v4.18.5 for three types of permission checks: Discretionary Access Controls (DAC), Capabilities, and Linux Security Modules (LSM). PeX reported 36 new permission check errors, 14 of which have been confirmed by the kernel developers.
Year
Venue
Field
2019
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 28TH USENIX SECURITY SYMPOSIUM
Permission,Computer science,Computer security,Linux kernel
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
1
0.36
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tong Zhang15318.56
Wenbo Shen21789.87
dongyoon lee31409.00
Changhee Jung491.76
Ahmed M. Azab540016.83
Ruowen Wang6393.06