KASLR: Break It, Fix It, Repeat

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the hardware-based Meltdown mitigations in recent Intel microarchitectures, revealing that illegally accessed data is only zeroed out. Hence, while non-present loads stall the CPU, illegal loads are still executed. We present EchoLoad, a novel technique to distinguish load stalls from transiently executed loads. EchoLoad allows detecting physically-backed addresses from unprivileged applications, breaking KASLR in 40's on the newest Meltdown- and MDS-resistant Cascade Lake microarchitecture. As EchoLoad only relies on memory loads, it runs in highly-restricted environments, e.g., SGX or JavaScript, making it the first JavaScript-based KASLR break. Based on EchoLoad, we demonstrate the first proof-of-concept Meltdown attack from JavaScript on systems that are still broadly not patched against Meltdown, i.e., 32-bit x86 OSs. We propose FLARE, a generic mitigation against known microarchitectural KASLR breaks with negligible overhead. By mapping unused kernel addresses to a reserved page and mirroring neighboring permission bits, we make used and unused kernel memory indistinguishable, i.e., a uniform behavior across the entire kernel address space, mitigating the root cause behind microarchitectural KASLR breaks. With incomplete hardware mitigations, we propose to deploy FLARE even on recent CPUs.