Securing your Linux Configuration (Kernel Hardening)

This article discusses the process by which your kernel’s configuration can be strengthened to protect against common security exploits. This is sometimes referred to as hardening, or specifically in this context, kernel configuration hardening.

Preface

A Linux kernel configuration is a file which defines all of the enabled (or disabled) options which are compiled in to your kernel. If you have not seen one before, they generally reside in the kernel’s build directory with a filename of “.config”. They are sometimes collapsed in to a defconfig (default config) file which only shows options which were not already selected by default.

This discussion will present many configuration tables in the form of:

In this case, it is recommended that the fictional option, OPTION1, is selected (CONFIG_OPTION1=y) in your kernel’s .config or defconfig file. It is also recommended that OPTION2 is disabled (CONFIG_OPTION2=is not set) in your kernel’s .config or defconfig file.

The option descriptions are sometimes difficult to interpret and may require further research. If you find an option that you’d like to know more information about, you may have to inspect the kernel source, search LWN, search Patchwork, or use your web search engine of choice.

Understanding Configuration Selections

When Linux kernel hardening, there are generally four categories of reason for which a configuration item may be enabled or disabled:

• Adding an additional level of protection against a known exploit by enabling a configuration item. For example:
  • Mitigating Spectre attacks with CONFIG_RETPOLINE=y (which traps the processor’s speculative execution paths for indirect address calls by using a return trampoline).
• Disabling a configuration item or subsystem which is known to be exploitable. For example:
  • Disabling the USB networking subsystem (USB_USBNET=is not set), so that applications using network-based IPC(Inter-Processor Communication) mechanisms may not be inadvertently exposed through a USB port.
  • Disabling /dev/mem access to physical memory (DEVMEM=is not set), so that physical memory cannot be easily modified.
• Enabling general security strengthening features in the kernel (which may necessarily protect against a presently known attack). For example:
  • Reducing the risk of memory page leakage by enabling page poisoning (PAGE_POISONING=Y) to overwrite any potentially sensitive information upon freeing.
  • Enabling Security-Enhanced Linux
• Disabling any unused kernel configuration options. If you don’t need it, disable it. As an added bonus, doing so may also improve your boot times.

The latter two options can help to protect against exploits which have not yet been discovered or released into the public domain (e.g. zero-day exploits) by reducing your kernel’s exploitable attack surface.

Analyzing, understanding, and modifying the kernel configuration with these tasks in mind is not trivial. Furthermore, in a large project it may not be clear exactly who is using which kernel configuration option. This can result in iterative backstepping until you arrive at a final configuration which works for your entire team.

There’s also a maintenance burden once you have created your final configuration. When you upgrade your kernel, many of the configuration options will have been removed and renamed. This will require another assessment and configuration period. Keeping your kernel up to date is extremely important, as security features are continuously added and revised in newer kernels. Starting a project with a long term stable (LTS) kernel is recommended, as an LTS kernel provides smaller (and sometimes backported) version increments to resolve security flaws (e.g upgrading from 5.0.x to 5.0.y). Such patches are provided until the long term stable support period ends.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Not all configuration items provide the same cost-benefit as others. To some extent, most options will have an impact in these key areas:

• Compile Time
  • This is especially true for security features which are checked by the compiler during compile time. For example, GCC_PLUGIN_STACKLEAK=Y will block uninitialized stack variable attacks through the use of a compiler plugin which searches for and initializes such variables.
  • This should not be considered a concern. Added compilation time is well worth the added security.
• Kernel Binary Size
  • This is usually not a concern. Adding and removing features may change the kernel size by a few megabytes, which is generally negligible on modern systems.
• Boot time
  • For example, DM_CRYPT=y, which adds drive encryption capabilities to your kernel, will add additional non-neglibile boot time to your system. This is because it may require booting in to an Initial Ram Filesystem, retreiving your disk encryption key, and ultimately mounting the encrypted disk through the device mapper subsystem. All of these steps add time to the boot process.
• Processor Load
  • This is perhaps the most concerning option and must be determined by trial and error. If every available security option is enabled on a slower ARM processor, there may be too much overhead to reliably run your processes (at a reasonable latency).
  • For example, erasing memory with PAGE_POISONING=Y will use CPU cycles. The amount of overhead added will be dependent upon factors such as your CPU and RAM speed.

Some configuration items will provide a better cost-benefit. Configuration items which have minimal impact on processor load are most valuable. For example, these add virtually no CPU overhead:

• Disabling DEBUG_BUGVERBOSE, which will help ensure that sensitive backtrace information is not leaked upon a kernel BUG() condition.
• Enabling ARCH_HAS_ELF_RANDOMIZE, which will make repeat exploits much more difficult by randomizing certain memory locations.

While these will add CPU overhead to some degree:

• Enabling DEBUG_VIRTUAL will enable some sanity checking in virt_to_page translation at the cost of CPU cycles.
• Enabling INIT_ON_ALLOC_DEFAULT_ON or INIT_ON_FREE_DEFAULT_ON will protect against heap memory leaks by erasing the regions after use, at the cost of erase time.

Using multiple kernel configurations (development and production) can be an option. While it is wise to develop on a prototype system that most closely resembles a production system (as to not cause unforseen bugs in changing timing conditions and loads between configurations), some security options be too cumbersome to reasonably develop on. If you’re writing a kernel driver and you need to use a tracing tool or read a core dump, then certainly enable them while developing.

Categories of Linux Kernel Hardening

In the Timesys Kernel Hardening Analysis Tool, the kernel security options have been divided into various groups. This categorization is by no means a definitive separation; some options could be further categorized or applied to multiple categories.

Memory Protection

Memory exploits are classes of attack in which an entity is able to retrieve or modified privileged information about the system. These can be further categorized into:

• Stack Overflow Protections: These are security features which seek to prevent access to and tampering of stack variables in memory. A stack canary (an arbitrary value sitting at the top of the stack, which, if modified, alerts the kernel of tampering) is sometimes mentioned in these protections.

• Heap Overflow: These are security features which seek to prevent heap memory exposure and modification.

• User Copy Protection: These are security features which seek to prevent memory exploitation during kernel and userspace memory transfer transactions.

• Information exposure: Options which are selected to limit exposure to privileged information.

• Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR): A security method by which kernel memory structures are randomized in order to prevent repeat or replay-style attacks.

Reducing Attack Surface

These are configuration options which can be selected to reduce the potential for exposure to unknown zero-day attacks by limiting the attack surface as much as we can. These are options that reduce the amount of information exposure and compiled-firmware attack surface (Again: If you don’t need it, disable it).

• Kernel Replacement Attacks: Methods in which a kernel binary could be replaced during runtime.

• Module Security Attacks: These are attacks which can be performed by loading a tainted, custom, module in to a system or maliciously modifying a pre-existing module’s memory. The mitigations for this mostly consist of restricting execution regions, making such regions read-only, and signature checking prior to loading modules.

• Reducing Syscall Exposure: Syscalls are interfaces in which user-space and kernel-space can communicate and access each other. Some legacy syscalls may be exploitable and are generally not required on modern systems. Disabling syscalls when possible is a good way to reduce your attack surface.

• Security Policy Attacks: These are attacks which attempt to gain elevated (root) privileges within a system, generally through the use or execution of a misconfigured binary or file. Mitigations for this mostly rely on Linux Security Modules (LSMs) which extend discretionary access control (DAC) or implement mandatory access control (MAC, Security-Enhanced Linux).

System Architecture

Many security features are architecture specific because of a specific hardware level reason (differing instruction set, caches, branch predictors, and more) or merely because they have not been implemented on a specific architecture. Looking at DEBUG_SET_MODULE_RONX, we find that it was a relatively recent addition for ARM and ARM64 architectures.

Looking at the Spectre and Meltdown variants, there are differing options depending on architecture as well:

Timesys Kernel Hardening Analysis Tool

This tool is available as part of the meta-vigishield layer, learn more about VigiShield here.

This Yocto-based tool can perform some security-minded analysis of your kernel configuration. The tool generates a report that shows the status of many configuration items which we have assessed as being security related.

The output from the Timesys Kernel Hardening Analysis Tool is formatted as a Comma Separated List (CSV). As an example, here are the first few lines from a sample report are:

In this case, GCC_PLUGIN_RANDSTRUCT was not enabled in the kernel configuration file, so the return status is, “FAILED.”

GCC_PLUGIN_ARM_SSP_PER_TASK, GCC_PLUGIN_STRUCTLEAK, INIT_ON_ALLOC_DEFAULT_ON, STRICT_KERNEL_RWX, and INIT_ON_FREE_DEFAULT_ON are all options which were available after the 5.0.19 kernel version, so those have been skipped with a, “SKIPPED (Version mismatch)” message.

The rest of the options were set appropriately and passed (STACKPROTECTOR and STACKPROTECTOR_STRONG).

Modules are also enabled without any forced signature checking, so the OR conditional [(MODULE_SIG_FORCE=Y) OR (MODULES=is not set)] for that has also failed.

Click here to get a free guide containing the entire list of recommended kernel security configurations to consider for hardening.

About Timesys

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