Being unfairly fair

Being unfairly fair

Posted Nov 20, 2012 11:56 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Attacking hardened Linux systems with kernel JIT spraying by cmccabe
Parent article: Attacking hardened Linux systems with kernel JIT spraying

To be fair, this vulnerability exploits a combination of JIT and direct execution. If all kernel code was JITted with the same VM, then this kind of attack would be useless.

To be even fairer, to the point of unfairness, Java may have had vulnerabilities e.g. in executing protected code; but no buffer overflows. In C, every time a pointer is not checked for null before jumping, or an array index is not checked to be within bounds, there is an opportunity for a security vulnerability. I would trade 1000s of vulnerabilities for a handful any time, if it was even feasible to run a kernel in a VM.

In real life a kernel cannot run in a VM because it would need a kernel to run the VM -- or the VM would become the kernel. This is the way of the microkernel, which is slow. Embedding a VM inside another VM has no advantages and only slows things down even more.

On the other hand there is no reason why a kernel cannot be written in an object-oriented, reference-counted language. I have been thinking for a long time that it would be a worthwhile project, but for some reason have not found the time to do it in my spare time. Perhaps Golang would be a worthwhile instrument for the task.

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