ISLAB: Immutable Memory Management Metadata for Commodity Operating System Kernels

Kernel memory allocators maintain several metadata structures optimized for efficiently managing system memory. However, existing implementations adopt either weak or no protection at all to ensure the integrity of said metadata in the presence of memory errors. In this paper, we first demonstrate how existing memory hardening schemes fall short against several in-kernel memory corruption scenarios. We then present ISLAB: a set of novel (slab-based) heap hardening techniques that aim to ensure the integrity of the memory managed by the kernel, and minimize the incurred runtime, and memory, overhead. ISLAB prevents memory corruption exploits by segregating metadata from within corruptible memory objects into shadow memory. It also relies on a novel SMAP-assisted memory isolation framework, called kSMAP, to protect allocator metadata against adversaries with stronger memory access capabilities. We implemented and evaluated ISLAB atop SLUB, the default slab allocator in Linux, and equipped it with kSMAP to protect process credentials, a popular target in kernel exploitation. Our experiments show that ISLAB incurs no runtime overhead in realistic benchmarks, and moderate overhead in stress tests. Lastly, we show how ISLAB’s approach can be generalized to protect the integrity of other kernel subsystems that use corruptible metadata for memory management, such as linked lists.