Eliminating the threat of kernel stack overflows

Abstract

The Linux kernel stack has a fixed size. There is no mechanism to prevent the kernel from overflowing the stack. Hackers can exploit this bug to put unwanted information in the memory of the operating system and gain control over the system. In order to prevent this problem, we introduce a dynamically sized kernel stack that can be integrated into the standard Linux kernel. The well-known paging mechanism is reused with some changes, in order to enable the kernel stack to grow.