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Dirty Cow Vulnerability CVE-2016-5195



Why it is called Dirty Cow?

 "A race condition was found in the way the Linux kernel's memory subsystem handled the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings. An unprivileged local user could use this flaw to gain write access to otherwise read-only memory mappings and thus increase their privileges on the system."

Who found the Dirty COW vulnerability?

Phil Oester

How to mitigate this vulnerability?

You need to update the kernel and make sure the kernel is patched for this vulnerability.

# yum update kernel
# uname -r // for getting the installed kernel.
# rpm -qa | grep kernel-name // for getting the package of the installed kernel.
# rpm -q --changlog | grep -i 'CVE-2016-5195' 
 - [mm] close FOLL MAP_PRIVATE race (Larry Woodman) [1385116 1385117] {CVE-2016-5195}


If this have a result like above , that means the cow is clean now :p

How to Build and use the systemtap workaround

First you have to install the rpm in the given order itself:

1) kernel-debuginfo-common
2) kernel-debuginfo
3) kernel-devel
4) systemtap-client
5) systemtap-devel

for example if the kernel is kernel-2.6.32-642.3.1.el6

# wget http://debuginfo.centos.org/6/x86_64/kernel-debuginfo-common-x86_64-2.6.32-642.3.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
# rpm -ivh kernel-debuginfo-common-x86_64-2.6.32-642.3.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
# wget http://debuginfo.centos.org/6/x86_64/kernel-debuginfo-2.6.32-642.3.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
# rpm -ivh kernel-debuginfo-2.6.32-642.3.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
# wget http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/fermi/slf6.4/x86_64/updates/security/kernel-devel-2.6.32-642.3.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
# rpm -ivh kernel-devel-2.6.32-642.3.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
# yum -y install systemtap-client
# yum -y install systemtap-devel

Now insert the below code in the file name dirtycow.stp

probe kernel.function(mem_write).call ? {
         = 0
}

probe syscall.ptrace {  // includes compat ptrace as well
         = 0xfff
}

probe begin {
        printk(0, CVE-2016-5195 mitigation loaded)
}


probe end {
        printk(0, CVE-2016-5195 mitigation unloaded)
}

#######

# stap -g -p 4 -m dirtycow_`uname -r|tr -cd [:digit:]` dirtycow.stp // THis command will create module named dirtycow_26326423168664.ko

# staprun -L dirtycow_26326423168664.ko // This will load this module to the kernel.

Now you can check if this is loaded by giving the below command.

# dmesg | grep CVE-2016-5195

NB: This module will not load to the kernel after a reboot of the server, so in-order to automatically load this module in the next reboot add the staprun command  to the /etc/rc.local file.


 That is all folks,
Cheers.

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