Signal Return Orientated Programming attacks

When a process is interrupted, the kernel suspends it and stores its state in a sigframe which is placed on the stack. The kernel then calls the appropriate signal handler code and after a sigreturn system call, reads the sigframe off the stack, restores state and resumes the process. However, by crafting a fake sigframe, we can trick the kernel into executing something else.

My friend Rashmica, an intern at OzLabs, has written an interesting blog post about this for some work she’s doing with the POWER architecture in Linux.

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