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4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies—Abstract
Pp. 155–167 of the Proceedings
TOCTTOU Vulnerabilities in UNIX-Style File Systems: An Anatomical Study
Jinpeng Wei and Calton Pu, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract
To Time of Use (TOCTTOU) vulnerabilities in Unix-style
file systems (e.g., Linux) are difficult to find and
prevent. We describe a comprehensive model of
TOCTTOU vulnerabilities, enumerating 224 file system
call pairs that may lead to successful TOCTTOU
attacks. Based on this model, we built kernel monitoring
tools that confirmed known vulnerabilities and discovered
new ones (in often-used system utilities such
as rpm, vi, and emacs). We evaluated the probability of
successfully exploiting these newly discovered vulnerabilities
and analyzed in detail the system events during
such attacks. Our performance evaluation shows
that the dynamic monitoring of system calls introduces
non-negligible overhead in microbenchmark of those
file system calls, but their impact on application
benchmarks such as Andrew and PostMark is only a
few percent.
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