Secure Rewind & Discard of Isolated Domains

This repository contains the source code for the paper Rewind & Discard: Improving Software Resilience using Isolated Domains

Abstract

Well-known defenses exist to detect and mitigate common faults and memory safety vulnerabilities in software. Yet, many of these mitigations do not address the challenge of software resilience and availability, i.e., whether a system can continue to carry out its function and remain responsive, while being under attack and subjected to malicious inputs. In this paper we propose secure rewind and discard of isolated domains as an efficient and secure method of improving the resilience of software that is targeted by run-time attacks. In difference to established approaches, we rely on compartmentalization instead of replication and checkpointing. We show the practicability of our methodology by realizing a software library for Secure Domain Rewind and Discard SDRaD and demonstrate how SDRaD can be applied to real-world software.

How to get started

• This repository can be cloned using the following commands:

git clone git@github.com:EricssonResearch/secure-rewind-and-discard.git

• To compile SDRaD, Run make in src/.

cd ./secure-rewind-and-discard/src
make

Please see src/README.md for the different compilation and run-time options supported by SDRaD.

Before running applications that rely on the SDRaD library (libsdrad.so) add the SDRaD src/ directory containing the shared object to the Linux dynamic linker search path:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH='/path/to/secure-rewind-and-discard/src'

If the application relies on pre-built binaries which make calls to the malloc() family of functions, you additionally need to ensure that libsdrad.so is loaded before all other shared libraries to ensure it can override the malloc() functions with its own versions. This can be achieved, for example, by setting the LD_PRELOAD environmental variable to point to libsdrad.so to instruct the Linux dynamic linker to preload libsdrad.so before glibc.

LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/secure-rewind-and-discard/src/libsdrad.so

Hardware Requirements

SDRaD requires a CPU supporting Intel Memory Protection Keys (MPK) and a Linux Kernel supporting MPK

Simple Example

We provide several examples that demonstrate the library's use in examples/

License

© Ericsson AB 2022-2023

BSD 3-Clause License

The modified TLSF implementation by mattconte/tlsf licensed under BSD 3-Clause License