Reminiscence security bugs are essentially the most quite a few class of Chrome safety points and we’re persevering with to examine many options – each in C++ and in new programming languages. The commonest sort of reminiscence security bug is the “use-after-free”. We not too long ago posted about an thrilling collection of applied sciences designed to forestall these. These applied sciences (collectively, *Scan, pronounced “star scan”) are very {powerful} however doubtless require {hardware} help for adequate efficiency.
At this time we’re going to speak a few completely different strategy to fixing the identical sort of bugs.
It’s onerous, if not unattainable, to keep away from use-after-frees in a non-trivial codebase. It’s hardly ever a mistake by a single programmer. As an alternative, one programmer makes affordable assumptions about how a little bit of code will work, then a later change invalidates these assumptions. Immediately, the info isn’t legitimate so long as the unique programmer anticipated, and an exploitable bug outcomes.
These bugs have actual penalties. For instance, in line with Google Risk Evaluation Group, a use-after-free within the ChromeHTML engine was exploited this yr by North Korea.
Half of the recognized exploitable bugs in Chrome are use-after-frees:
Diving Deeper: Not All Use-After-Free Bugs Are Equal
Chrome has a multi-process structure, partly to make sure that internet content material is remoted right into a sandboxed “renderer” course of the place little hurt can happen. An attacker due to this fact normally wants to seek out and exploit two vulnerabilities – one to realize code execution within the renderer course of, and one other bug to interrupt out of the sandbox.
The primary stage is usually the simpler one. The attacker has plenty of affect within the renderer course of. It’s straightforward to rearrange reminiscence in a particular manner, and the renderer course of acts upon many various sorts of internet content material, giving a big “assault floor” that would doubtlessly be exploited.
The second stage, escaping the renderer sandbox, is trickier. Attackers have two choices how to do that:
- They’ll exploit a bug within the underlying working system (OS) by way of the restricted interfaces obtainable inside Chrome’s sandbox.
- Or, they’ll exploit a bug in a extra {powerful}, privileged a part of Chrome – just like the “browser” course of. This course of coordinates all the opposite bits of Chrome, so basically has to be omnipotent.
We think about the attackers squeezing by way of the slender a part of a funnel:
If we will scale back the scale of the slender a part of the funnel, we are going to make it as onerous as doable for attackers to assemble a full exploit chain. We will scale back the scale of the orange slice by eradicating entry to extra OS interfaces inside the renderer course of sandbox, and we’re repeatedly engaged on that. The MiraclePtr undertaking goals to cut back the scale of the blue slice.
Right here’s a pattern of 100 current excessive severity Chrome safety bugs that made it to the secure channel, divided by root trigger and by the method they have an effect on.
You would possibly discover:
- This doesn’t fairly add as much as 100 – that’s as a result of just a few bugs had been in different processes past the renderer or browser.
- We claimed that the browser course of is the tougher half to take advantage of, but there are extra potentially-exploitable bugs! Which may be so, however we imagine they’re sometimes tougher to take advantage of as a result of the attacker has much less management over reminiscence structure.
As you possibly can see, the largest class of bugs in every course of is: V8 within the renderer course of (JavaScript engine logic bugs – work in progress) and use-after-free bugs within the browser course of. If we will make that “skinny” bit thinner nonetheless by eradicating a few of these use-after-free bugs, we make the entire job of Chrome exploitation markedly tougher.
MiraclePtr: Stopping Exploitation of Use-After-Free Bugs
That is the place MiraclePtr is available in. It’s a expertise to forestall exploitation of use-after-free bugs. Not like aforementioned *Scan applied sciences that provide a non-invasive strategy to this downside, MiraclePtr depends on rewriting the codebase to make use of a brand new sensible pointer sort, raw_ptr<T>. There are a number of methods to implement MiraclePtr. We got here up with ~10 algorithms and in contrast the professionals and cons. After analyzing their efficiency overhead, reminiscence overhead, safety safety ensures, developer ergonomics, and so forth., we concluded that BackupRefPtr was essentially the most promising answer.
The BackupRefPtr algorithm is predicated on reference counting. It makes use of help of Chrome’s personal heap allocator, PartitionAlloc, which carves out a bit of further area for a hidden reference depend for every allocation. raw_ptr<T> increments or decrements the reference depend when it’s constructed, destroyed or modified. When the appliance calls free/delete and the reference depend is bigger than 0, PartitionAlloc quarantines that reminiscence area as an alternative of instantly releasing it. The reminiscence area is then solely made obtainable for reuse as soon as the reference depend reaches 0. Quarantined reminiscence is poisoned to additional scale back the probability that use-after-free accesses will end in exploitable situations, and in hope that future accesses result in an easy-to-debug crash, turning these safety points into less-dangerous ones.
class A { ... };
class B {
B(A* a) : a_(a) {}
void doSomething() { a_->doSomething(); }
raw_ptr<A> a_; // MiraclePtr
};
std::unique_ptr<A> a = std::make_unique<A>();
std::unique_ptr<B> b = std::make_unique<B>(a.get());
[…]
a = nullptr; // The free is delayed as a result of the MiraclePtr remains to be pointing to the thing.
b->doSomething(); // Use-after-free is neutralized.
We efficiently rewrote greater than 15,000 uncooked pointers within the Chrome codebase into raw_ptr<T>, then enabled BackupRefPtr for the browser course of on Home windows and Android (each 64 bit and 32 bit) in Chrome 102 Steady. We anticipate that MiraclePtr meaningfully reduces the browser course of assault floor of Chrome by defending ~50% of use-after-free points towards exploitation. We are actually engaged on enabling BackupRefPtr within the community, utility and GPU processes, and for different platforms. In the long run state, our aim is to allow BackupRefPtr on all platforms as a result of that ensures {that a} given pointer is protected for all customers of Chrome.
Balancing Safety and Efficiency
There is no such thing as a free lunch, nevertheless. This safety safety comes at a price, which we’ve got fastidiously weighed in our choice making.
Unsurprisingly, the principle price is reminiscence. Fortunately, associated investments into PartitionAlloc over the previous yr led to 10-25% complete reminiscence financial savings, relying on utilization patterns and platforms. So we had been capable of spend a few of these financial savings on safety: MiraclePtr elevated the reminiscence utilization of the browser course of 4.5-6.5% on Home windows and three.5-5% on Android1, nonetheless properly under their earlier ranges. Whereas we had been apprehensive about quarantined reminiscence, in observe it is a tiny fraction (0.01%) of the browser course of utilization. By far the larger perpetrator is the extra reminiscence wanted to retailer the reference depend. One would possibly suppose that including 4 bytes to every allocation wouldn’t be a giant deal. Nevertheless, there are lots of small allocations in Chrome, so even the 4B overhead is just not negligible. PartitionAlloc additionally makes use of pre-defined bucket sizes, so this further 4B pushes sure allocations (significantly power-of-2 sized) into a bigger bucket, e.g. 4096B->5120B.
We additionally thought of the efficiency price. Including an atomic increment/decrement on frequent operations equivalent to pointer project has unavoidable overhead. Having excluded a variety of performance-critical pointers, we drove this overhead down till we may acquire again the identical margin by way of different efficiency optimizations. On Home windows, no statistically important efficiency regressions had been noticed on most of our top-level efficiency metrics like Largest Contentful Paint, First Enter Delay, and so forth. The one antagonistic change there1 is a rise of the principle thread competition (~7%). On Android1, along with an identical enhance in the principle thread competition (~6%), there have been small regressions in First Enter Delay (~1%), Enter Delay (~3%) and First Contentful Paint (~0.5%). We do not anticipate these regressions to have a noticeable affect on consumer expertise, and are assured that they’re strongly outweighed by the extra security for our customers.
We should always emphasize that MiraclePtr at present protects solely class/struct pointer fields, to attenuate the overhead. As future work, we’re exploring choices to broaden the pointer protection to on-stack pointers in order that we will shield towards extra use-after-free bugs.
Observe that the first aim of MiraclePtr is to forestall exploitation of use-after-free bugs. Though it wasn’t designed for diagnosability, it already helped us discover and repair a variety of bugs that had been beforehand undetected. We now have ongoing efforts to make MiraclePtr crash stories much more informative and actionable.
Proceed to Present Us Suggestions
Final however not least, we’d wish to encourage safety researchers to proceed to report points by way of the Chrome Vulnerability Reward Program, even when these points are mitigated by MiraclePtr. We nonetheless have to make MiraclePtr obtainable to all customers, gather extra knowledge on its affect by way of reported points, and additional refine our processes and tooling. Till that’s finished, we is not going to contemplate MiraclePtr when figuring out the severity of a bug or the reward quantity.
1 Measured in Chrome 99.
