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Analysis and Remodeling of the DirtyCOW Vulnerability by Debugging and Abstraction

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Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method (SOFL+MSVL 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12028))

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Abstract

It is hard to understand clearly the principle of DirtyCOW vulnerability of Linux operating system, even for many experienced kernel developers. An approach is presented to rebuild the design model of the related Linux system calls, which gives an insight into the vulnerability. The remodeling, i.e. model-rebuilding, is done by first constructing a control flow diagram based on the debugging and analysis of the OS kernel, and then turning the control flow diagram to an abstract program based on abstraction to the observed concrete states. The approach provides an effective way for the comprehension of complex legacy software.

Supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFB1001802 and 2018YFB0204301).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The function __get_user_pages calls follow_page_pte only once, therefore the events in Line 13, 21, 40, 48 correspond to the same control point. The multiple occurrences of faultin_page are similar.

  2. 2.

    “}mmap" means the event “Function mmap() ends".

  3. 3.

    In different tests, the virtual address may vary, and the addresses of other kernel objects may also be different with those in this paper.

  4. 4.

    This is page frame number, and the corresponding physical address is 0x66c3000.

References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Yanjun Wen & Ji Wang

Authors
  1. Yanjun Wen
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  2. Ji Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yanjun Wen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

    Huaikou Miao

  2. Institute of Computing Theory and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, China

    Cong Tian

  3. Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan

    Shaoying Liu

  4. Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China

    Zhenhua Duan

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Wen, Y., Wang, J. (2020). Analysis and Remodeling of the DirtyCOW Vulnerability by Debugging and Abstraction. In: Miao, H., Tian, C., Liu, S., Duan, Z. (eds) Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method. SOFL+MSVL 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12028. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41418-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41418-4_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-41417-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-41418-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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