Ghost Busters: A Tale of Spectre, ELF ABI, and Computational Privilege

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Presented at BSidesAugusta 2018 by

Prashant Shapiro

In this talk, we describe ELF-based access control (ELFbac) and how it can naturally mitigate Spectre (variant 1). ELFbac is a novel technique for defining and enforcing policy at an intra-process granularity. Its mechanisms allow us to isolate semantically distinct code and data by placing them in separate ELF sections. This isolation can be used to effectively “hide” sensitive data from code that handles untrusted inputs. ELFbac leverages the ABI format and the forgotten capabilities of the ELF loader as first-order security primitives.