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Article . 2024
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GhostRace: Exploiting and Mitigating Speculative Race Conditions

Authors: Ragab, Hany; Mambretti, Andrea; Kurmus, Anil; Giuffrida, Cristiano;

GhostRace: Exploiting and Mitigating Speculative Race Conditions

Abstract

Race conditions arise when multiple threads attempt to access a shared resource without proper synchronization, often leading to vulnerabilities such as concurrent use-after-free. To mitigate their occurrence, operating systems rely on synchronization primitives such as mutexes, spinlocks, etc. In this paper, we present GhostRace, the first security analysis of these primitives on speculatively executed code paths. Our key finding is that all the common synchronization primitives can be microarchitecturally bypassed on speculative paths, turning all architecturally race-free critical regions into Speculative Race Conditions (SRCs). To study the severity of SRCs, we focus on Speculative Concurrent Use-After-Free (SCUAF) and uncover 1,283 potentially exploitable gadgets in the Linux kernel. Moreover, we demonstrate that SCUAFinformation disclosure attacks against the kernel are not only practical, but that their reliability can closely match that of traditional Spectre attacks, with our proof of concept leaking kernel memory at 12 KB/s. Crucially, we develop a new technique to create an unbounded race window, accommodating an arbitrary number of SCUAF invocations required by an end-to-end attack in a single race window. To address the new attack surface, we also propose a generic SRC mitigation to harden all the affected synchronization primitives on Linux. Our mitigation requires minimal kernel changes and incurs only ≈5% geomean performance overhead on LMBench.

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
Green