POSTED BY: Patroklos Argyroudis / 20.02.2009

FreeBSD kernel stack overflows

Last May (2008-05-30) I presented my research on FreeBSD kernel stack overflows at the University of Piraeus Software Libre Society, Event #16: Computer Security. The slides from the talk are now available in our research section.

In the talk I explored in detail the process of exploiting kernel stack overflows in the 7.0 production release of the FreeBSD operating system. There were extensive examples and live experimentation, all of which are unfortunately not reflected in the supporting slides. The main contribution of the study is the development of a kernel exploitation algorithm and the presentation of comprehensive i386 kernel shellcode. Although the focus was on the then most current production release of FreeBSD (7.0), the presented algorithm and methodologies are applicable to both the latest stable (7.1) and current (8.0) FreeBSD versions.