Containing a Confused Deputy on x86: A Survey of Privilege Escalation Mitigation Techniques

The weak separation between userand kernelspace in modern operating systems facilitates several forms of privilege escalation. This paper provides a survey of protection techniques, both cutting-edge and time-tested, used to prevent common privilege escalation attacks. The techniques are compared against each other in terms of their effectiveness, their performance impact, the complexity of their implementation, and their impact on diversification techniques such as ASLR. Overall the literature provides a litany of disjoint techniques, each of which trades some performance cost for effectiveness against a particular isolated threat. No single technique was found to effectively mitigate all known and potential attack vectors with reasonable performance cost overhead. Keywords—Protection & Security; Virtualization; Kernel ROP; ret2usr; Kernel Code Implant; rootkits; Operating Systems; Privilege Escalation