Application Confinement¶

We discuss solutions for confining (isolating) applications for damage control: in case an application is compromised the damage done must be limited.

Slides for this session:

Tasks¶

Download the session task archive.

Access the shellcode/ subfolder. We assume a shellcode is injected maliciously inside an executable and we want to use different mechanisms to protect it. To simplify things we add the shellcode in the source code and compile it to execute the shellcode.

There are two subfolders: generate-shellcode/ for generating a shellcode and run-shellcode/ for running a shellcode inside an executable. Use make print in generate-shellcode/ to generate the shellcode. It is part of the shellcode array in exec.c in run-shellcode/.

Test what it does by running strace ./exec in generate-shellcode.

Inspect the shellcode implementation in shellcode.asm. Update the shellcode to also open the two files from ../../jail/a.txt and ../../b.txt using the open system call: the first argument (in ebx) is a pointer to the string denoting the filename, the second argument (in ecx) is O_RDONLY (see its numeric value in /usr/include/bits/fcntl-linux.h).

Generate the new shellcode (using make print), replace it in exec.c, recompile the exec executable, and then test it again by running strace ./vuln.
Let’s use AppArmor to allow the exec executable from the previous task to open the a.txt file, but not the b.txt file (i.e. the first open system call in the shellcode will succeed, but the second open system call will fail).

AppArmor needs to be installed on your system. If you you have trouble installing it, use this Debian virtual machine. Use the cs.curs.pub.ro account to download it.

Follow the Debian AppArmor HowToUse instructions. Use the file /etc/default/grub for configuring GRUB. Do not use /etc/default/grub.d/apparmor.cfg as shown in the page.

Create a profile for exec in /etc/apparmor.d/ to alllow the exec executable to access a.txt but prevent it from accessing b.txt. Start from the bin.ping profile. You need to use full paths.

At any point you can use ps -efZ to see what processes are confined.
Now we want to use chroot to allow the program to access ../jail/a.txt but prevent it from accessing ../b.txt.

Access the chroot/ subfolder. Go into the exec executable and update the A_PATH and B_PATH macros for full paths to a.txt and b.txt. Compile the exec executable and run it under chroot in the ../jail/ folder.

In order to run an executable inside a folder as a chroot jail run:
```
sudo chroot ../jail/ ./exec
```
The executable exec has to be part of the jail. All required files (including library files) need to be inside the jail. a.txt is already part of the jail. Use ldd exec to determine the library files required by the executable. You need to copy them full paths inside the jail.

After a successful run in the chroot jail, the exec program will open the a.txt file but not the b.txt file.
Now we want to use sandboxing (seccomp) to allow the program to open the ../jail/a.txt file, but not the ../b.txt file.

Access the seccomp/ subfolder. Inspect the exec.c file and see what it does and what calls should succeed or not. Compile it using make. Run strace ./exec and see what calls are allowed and what calls are not allowed.

Update the exec.c file to enforce and check that read and write is allowed to the a.txt file, but only read is allowed to the b.txt file.

You need the libseccomp-dev:i386 installed on the system. To install it run:
```
sudo apt install gcc-multilib libseccomp-dev:i386
```
Bonus: Update the exec.c program to invoke the read and write system calls from inside a shellcode, similar to way its done in the shellcode/run-shellcode/exec.c.