Fixing races for fun and profit: How to abuse atime

Nikita Borisov; Rob Johnson; Naveen Sastry; David Wagner

Fixing races for fun and profit: How to abuse atime

Nikita Borisov, Rob Johnson, Naveen Sastry, David Wagner

Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper › peer-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 language	English (US)
Pages	303-314
Number of pages	12
State	Published - 2005
Externally published	Yes
Event	14th USENIX Security Symposium - Baltimore, United States Duration: Jul 31 2005 → Aug 5 2005

Conference

Conference	14th USENIX Security Symposium
Country/Territory	United States
City	Baltimore
Period	7/31/05 → 8/5/05

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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

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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.",

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AU - Sastry, Naveen

AU - Wagner, David

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AB - 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.

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Fixing races for fun and profit: How to abuse atime

Abstract

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ASJC Scopus subject areas

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