Repository logo

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
  1. Home
  2. Academic and Research Output
  3. Conferences, Workshops, Symposiums, and Seminars
  4. PoLPer: Process-Aware Restriction of Over-Privileged Setuid Calls in Legacy Applications
 
conference paper

PoLPer: Process-Aware Restriction of Over-Privileged Setuid Calls in Legacy Applications

Jeon, Yuseok
•
Rhee, Junghwan
•
Kim, Chung Hwan
Show more
January 1, 2019
Proceedings Of The Ninth Acm Conference On Data And Application Security And Privacy (Codaspy '19)
9th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY)

setuid system calls enable critical functions such as user authentications and modular privileged components. Such operations must only be executed after careful validation. However, current systems do not perform rigorous checks, allowing exploitation of privileges through memory corruption vulnerabilities in privileged programs. As a solution, understanding which setuid system calls can be invoked in what context of a process allows precise enforcement of least privileges. We propose a novel comprehensive method to systematically extract and enforce least privilege of setuid system calls to prevent misuse. Our approach learns the required process contexts of setuid system calls along multiple dimensions: process hierarchy, call stack, and parameter in a process-aware way. Every setuid system call is then restricted to the per-process context by our kernel-level context enforcer. Previous approaches without process-awareness are too coarse-grained to control setuid system calls, resulting in over-privilege. Our method reduces available privileges even for identical code depending on whether it is run by a parent or a child process. We present our prototype called PoLPer which systematically discovers only required setuid system calls and effectively prevents real-world exploits targeting vulnerabilities of the setuid family of system calls in popular desktop and server software at near zero overhead.

  • Details
  • Metrics
Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3292006.3300028
Web of Science ID

WOS:000470891000023

Author(s)
Jeon, Yuseok
Rhee, Junghwan
Kim, Chung Hwan
Li, Zhichun
Payer, Mathias  
Lee, Byoungyoung
Wu, Zhenyu
Date Issued

2019-01-01

Publisher

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

Publisher place

New York

Published in
Proceedings Of The Ninth Acm Conference On Data And Application Security And Privacy (Codaspy '19)
ISBN of the book

978-1-4503-6099-9

Start page

209

End page

220

Subjects

setuid system calls

•

least privilege principle

•

process hierarchy

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
HEXHIVE  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
9th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY)

Richardson, TX

Mar 25-27, 2019

Available on Infoscience
June 27, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/158584
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
  • Contact
  • infoscience@epfl.ch

  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on LinkedIn
  • Follow us on X
  • Follow us on Youtube
AccessibilityLegal noticePrivacy policyCookie settingsEnd User AgreementGet helpFeedback

Infoscience is a service managed and provided by the Library and IT Services of EPFL. © EPFL, tous droits réservés