Mitigating Processor Vulnerabilities by Restructuring the Kernel Address Space
summary
Presents a kernel-design mitigation for Meltdown and Spectre v1/v2 implemented in the Hedron microhypervisor that relocates process-specific kernel data into a process-local portion of the kernel address space. The approach confines what a userspace attacker can read (only the kernel data for its own process) by making kernel address-space switches coincide with normal process address-space switches, aiming to avoid the costly instructions and CPU-specific features used by KAISER/branch-predictor barriers. The prototype has been used to measure the runtime overhead of this restructuring.
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