kR^X: Comprehensive Kernel Protection against Just-In-Time Code Reuse

The abundance of memory corruption and disclosure vulnerabilities in kernel code necessitates the deployment of hardening techniques to prevent privilege escalation attacks. As more strict memory isolation mechanisms between the kernel and user space, like Intel's SMEP, become commonplace, attackers increasingly rely on code reuse techniques to exploit kernel vulnerabilities. Contrary to similar attacks in more restrictive settings, such as web browsers, in kernel exploitation, non-privileged local adversaries have great flexibility in abusing memory disclosure vulnerabilities to dynamically discover, or infer, the location of certain code snippets and construct code-reuse payloads. Recent studies have shown that the coupling of code diversification with the enforcement of a "read XOR execute" (R^X) memory safety policy is an effective defense against the exploitation of userland software, but so far this approach has not been applied for the protection of the kernel itself. In this paper, we fill this gap by presenting kR^X: a kernel hardening scheme based on execute-only memory and code diversification. We study a previously unexplored point in the design space, where a hypervisor or a super-privileged component is not required. Implemented mostly as a set of GCC plugins, kR^X is readily applicable to the x86-64 Linux kernel and can benefit from hardware support (e.g., MPX on modern Intel CPUs) to optimize performance. In full protection mode, kR^X incurs a low runtime overhead of 4.04%, which drops to 2.32% when MPX is available.