Debut Usenix, Baidu security oases cheer Zhuo Guardian Flower Messenger

local time August 16-18th, USENIX security conference, one of the world's four top security conferences, was held in Vancouver, Canada, where information security researchers and security experts from around the world presented and discussed the latest results on hot topics and technologies in a number of areas. Baidu Security Laboratory was invited to publish papers and lectures at the meeting, sharing oases adaptive Android security solutions. It is understood that this is not only Baidu successfully selected the world's top academic conference, but also marked in the world's four top security academic conferences, Baidu Security has become the only one to achieve back-to-back "grand slam" of Chinese companies, security research and industry practice are in the world's leading position.

Severe fragmentation leads to a "flawed" Android system

The security of the Android system has been a long-overdue criticism. According to Google's August Android Market share report, although the 5.0 version was released in November 2014, there are still more than 32% devices using 5.0 or below, while updates to 7.0 and above are only 13.5%. It can be seen that Android update is slow, bug fix serious lag problem is very serious.

In addition, the world has more than the thousands of Android device brands, more than 20,000 device models. In such a severe fragmented ecosystem, traditional bug fixes and system upgrades are costly and difficult. Coupled with the lack of security technology, the ability to upgrade and fix vulnerabilities in some equipment vendors and system solutions, the Android ecosystem has always been a "riddled" state. After a number of bug patches have been released for a year or so, there are still a large number of devices not completing the upgrade.

The consequences of "flawed" is obvious, once the system vulnerability is exploited by hackers, it is equal to the mobile phone and application to a drastic, the security of the app is done better, also because the Linux kernel was invaded, and along with the whole system "fall."

Defects in existing heat repair schemes are obvious

To solve the problem of Android vulnerability, we must meet three conditions: one is self-adaptive, to achieve the vulnerability of different versions of the hot fix, the second is security, both to repair the vulnerability of Android, repair program is also easy to audit, to ensure that the program itself is secure; third, rapid repair, vulnerability announcement can be quickly repaired in the short term, Avoid being exploited by hackers.

Given that there are already thousands of Android devices on the market, more than 20,000 device models, this is almost impossible to do!

In fact, the security industry has been trying to solve this problem, such as kpatch/kgraft/ksplice/kup and other traditional kernel hot fixes, are in the kernel layer to modify the binary code to achieve the purpose of maintaining system security, but they are more or less a variety of problems, such as:

First, these traditional repair programs are dependent on the kernel source code, and equipment manufacturers are difficult to open the core source of all equipment in time, which allows other security vendors can not be based on the different equipment, timely update bug fixes;

Second, the traditional fix approach is to generate a corresponding rewrite patch for each version of the kernel for each device, so there is no real "adaptive" and therefore a huge amount of work. Also, if a malicious patch or patch author goes wrong, it can cause the entire system to crash.

The system vulnerability is frequent, the repair scheme does not give the force, cause the Android system "unsafe" label has been difficult to tear off.

Oases five major strategies to implement 100% bug fixes

Last year, Baidu security for the Android system of this "stubborn", launched the oases solution, it can support the current market all the mainstream Android devices, can 100% repair all the vulnerabilities, and achieve 93.4% of adaptive heat repair.

An almost impossible task, Baidu Security is how to do it? At this Usenix security conference, a researcher from Baidu Security Laboratory explained Oases's five strategies:

First, in order to solve the system-level vulnerability and maximize the adaptability of the scheme, the oases scheme blocks the attack from the logical layer, rather than relying entirely on rewriting the binary instructions, thus getting rid of the adaptation problems brought by the underlying compilation difference, which greatly improves the adaptability of the scheme and reduces the workload of the security personnel to write the repair program.

Second, in order to prevent malicious patches from causing the system to crash, the oases solution supports the use of a memory-safe language to write security patches that allow for strict security restrictions and review of patches, ensuring the security and availability of each vulnerability fix.

Thirdly, there are many versions of Android, the oases scheme treats the patched kernel with semantic clustering, and the semantic-like vulnerability function can apply the same fix, not only the binary consistency is applied to fix. This further improves self-adaptability and security.

Finally, the oases scheme is designed to fix the grading strategy. The fix can occur at the upper call of the vulnerability function (including the system call entry), the entry or return of the vulnerability function, the entry or return of the function that the vulnerability function is toned into. Therefore, the self-adaptability of the whole scheme is further improved.

The safety plan of ecological construction. Baidu Security also joint equipment manufacturers, security vendors and various universities research units composed of oases Safety Ecological Alliance, Open, joint, collaborative mode to repair loopholes, fight black production. Openness has led to an overall improvement in the industry, and for this reason, oases has opened all the code to the Alliance, providing an open and transparent solution.

With these five strategies, Android users do not have to restart the system to achieve rapid, high-volume repair of vulnerabilities, to ensure that the end-user system security, not malicious intrusion or root. Baidu Security said that oases has been in more than 1100 different Android version of the systematic verification test, can do to support the majority of the current market Android devices, but also for the traditional desktop, server Linux repair and so on. It can support 100% of bug fixes, 93.4% of which are self-adaptive and have little impact on performance without impacting the user experience.

Openness, transparency and ecological co-construction

The oases program was highly recognized by the participants at the USENIX Conference. And before that, Baidu Security has been continuously unveiled "BIG4" of the other three top-level meetings: CCS2016 on the Taintart security analysis, NDSS 2017 on the pseudo-base station recognition technology, and s&p2017 on the black Word automatic mining and malicious SEO research. In the average paper admission rate of less than 20% of the four top security summit, Baidu security unfolds, it can be seen its security research and technology leadership.

Baidu chief Security scientist, Security laboratory director Wei Tao told reporters: "Baidu in the fight against black production, mobile security, IoT security and AI security in the field of continuous investment, while actively and academia excellent team cooperation, has a lot of excellent results. We will gradually share the research results presented at the four conferences with more ecological partners, and jointly promote the construction of cyber security. ”

Liu Yan, Zen Road ponder Internet, public number: liukuang110

Debut Usenix, Baidu security oases cheer Zhuo Guardian Flower Messenger