[edk2-devel] [edk2-discuss] GSoC Proposal

[Zimmer, Vincent]

Fyi
There is a running list of some edk2 defense-in-depth work at https://github.com/jyao1/SecurityEx/blob/master/Summary.md, too, including ASLR, if you haven't already seen that material

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss at edk2.groups.io <discuss at edk2.groups.io> On Behalf Of Marvin Häuser
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2022 5:31 AM
To: Ada Christine <adachristine18 at gmail.com>; edk2-devel-groups-io <devel at edk2.groups.io>; Desimone, Nathaniel L <nathaniel.l.desimone at intel.com>; Mike Wolan <mwolan at caseking.de>; Kinney, Michael D <michael.d.kinney at intel.com>
Cc: Andrew Fish <afish at apple.com>; discuss at edk2.groups.io; Pedro Falcato <pedro.falcato at gmail.com>; Shi, Steven <steven.shi at intel.com>
Subject: Re: [edk2-devel] [edk2-discuss] GSoC Proposal

CC Mike (proposal review as per announcement mail)

Hey Ada,

I can neither decide on nor even view your proposal (I think that's up to Nate and Mike?), but I had a brief conversation with Vitaly about the Amaranth downstream. There are other potentially technologically related topics Vitaly's team wants to deploy, including driver sandboxing and ASLR (both will probably significantly impact paging). The easiest route for these two is likely to let go of identity mapping. *If* this is feasible and will be accepted upstream, prelinking might become a much simpler matter. For memory protection, all PE/COFF image sections must be page-aligned anyway, so depending on how the more sophisticated paging would actually work, there may be a lot of wiggle room for where to load modules wrt virtual addresses. In *simple and naive* theory, they could all be assigned a virtual base address at UEFI image construction (which will be free from any physical memory layout constraints due to non-identity mapping) and ASLR could just be a slide value that shifts the entire executable UEFI address space around (randomised). With (virtual) addresses known at build-time, none of that "custom relocation" madness I mentioned before is relevant (gladly). Of course, there needs to be discussion whether fine-grained ASLR would be worth the trouble first.

To get more input on the "ecosystem" of security features mentioned (ASLR, sandboxing, prelinking), we will try to discuss it with Microsoft next week. If you are interested in a prelinking route, I can let you know. This would unlikely be quick to deploy, however, and it would need strong support from Intel. I think the overall pool of ideas is clear now and I'll leave it to you and Nate. Good luck!

Best regards,
Marvin

On 15.04.22 14:09, Ada Christine wrote:
> Hi Everybody
>
> I've read all the discussion here and condensed my plan into a short 
> project proposal. It's a little short and light on detail at the 
> moment because I'm pressed for time for other matters today, but I 
> wanted to get something in before EOD today as requested. Anybody 
> else's input or a change in the overall strategy to allow for code 
> sharing between DXE modules, whether it be prelinking or some kind of 
> function pointer table is absolutely welcome and I'm not attached to 
> any particular way of solving the code repetition problem. You can 
> find my proposal here 
> https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/proposals/details/whGX9tXL
>
> Looking forward to your commentary!
>
> Thanks!
> - Ada Christine








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