"kmemcheck is a patch to the linux kernel that detects use of uninitialized memory. It does this by trapping every read and write to memory that was allocated dynamically (e.g. using kmalloc()). If a memory address is read that has not previously been written to, a message is printed to the kernel log."The author provided a sample log file from the patch which is here. I spent a few minutes browsing it and I think it definitely shows promise for more than debugging. **Consider the case of these ELF loader vulnerabilities found by Paul Starzetz in 2004. Bug [1] is basically incorrect checking of the kernel_read() return value. Here's the bug:
...
size = elf_ex.e_phnum * sizeof(struct elf_phdr);
elf_phdata = (struct elf_phdr *) kmalloc(size, GFP_KERNEL);
if (!elf_phdata)
goto out;
retval = kernel_read(bprm->file, elf_ex.e_phoff, (char *) elf_phdata, size);
if (retval < 0)
goto out_free_ph;
...
The code above makes the incorrect assumption that kernel_read() will return less than zero if an error occurs. This is true however kernel_read() can also return greater than zero but less than 'size'. Which in this case leaves a portion of elf_phdata uninitialized. Whats my point? I'm getting to that. An attacker can potentially control this uninitialized data and take control of a process image. Now this particular bug is pretty hard to trigger and even harder to exploit. But the important thing is kmemcheck may have caught this particular issue, and others like it. kmemcheck would fire off a log entry when the ELF loader goes to read the uninitialized data in elf_phdata because technically the attacker controlled data was never written to it in this context, its old 'left over' data. Very neat stuff.
The kernel allocators are a bit more complex than malloc in userland though. The slab code has many small details about it that can make or break a kmalloc based vulnerability, but the concept here is very intriguing regardless. You can grab the kmemcheck patches here.
**As a side note, I took a quick look at linux/fs/binfmt_elf_fdpic.c and found this bug in virtually the same place as Paul found it and in an additional spot as well, where the program interpreter is loaded. They affect a small population and have already been fixed.
