Fixing races for fun and profit: How to abuse atime

Nikita Borisov, Rob Johnson, Naveen Sastry, David Wagner

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Dean and Hu proposed a probabilistic countermeasure to the classic access(2)/open(2) TOCTTOU race condition in privileged Unix programs [4]. In this paper, we describe an attack that succeeds with very high probability against their countermeasure. We then consider a stronger randomized variant of their defense and show that it, too, is broken. We conclude that access(2) must never be used in privileged Unix programs. The tools we develop can be used to attack other filesystem races, underscoring the importance of avoiding such races in secure software.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages303-314
Number of pages12
StatePublished - 2005
Externally publishedYes
Event14th USENIX Security Symposium - Baltimore, United States
Duration: Jul 31 2005Aug 5 2005

Conference

Conference14th USENIX Security Symposium
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBaltimore
Period7/31/058/5/05

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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