Too bad the author picked the MIT license. Had they picked (A)GPL, it would have forced the criminals to distribute a copy of LICENSE.TXT alongside their improved copy of the source code on systems they compromise. Failing this, using it in that way would be both a crime and an instance of copyright infringement.
Although, it occurs to me that if they don't give credits to the original author, it's also already a copyright infringement under the MIT.
The anti-tivoization clause in Version 3 would allow users to modify and replace the rootkit with their own, more or less malicious version, even if it would otherwise violate copyright law.
Well-made distinction; +1.
Pretty sure all laws are null and void in their mind.
Can a kernel be compiled with Ftrace forced off? If it can be disabled at runtime, I take it it's not mandatory for the kernel to work. And I don't just mean off: I mean striping the Ftrace code path (dead code elimination or whatever).
I'm also interested in other measures, like a unified kernel moreover without the ability to load modules but this is not what my question is about. I'd like to know if Ftrace can just be turned off for good at kernel compile time.
grep FTRACE /boot/config*
Been working on a derviative which hooks the VFS to allow dynamically remapping file paths on a per process basis so I can force badly behaved apps to load custom TLS certificates (looking at you Bazil builds in nixpkgs).
(If anyone knows something which already does this it would save me a lot of yak shaving)
Uh, what limits? I'm not aware of anything that would stop your module, once probed, from reaching around the back of the kernel and futzing around in the internals of another driver/device in a completely unrelated subsystem, or subsystem internals. SoC/SoM vendors love to pull that kind of crap in their BSPs.
> hooks the VFS to allow dynamically remapping file paths on a per process basis
Instead of messing with kernel VFS internals, you could try:
- patching the offending application or package (ideally make the path configurable and contribute that back upstream)
- running the application in a mount namespace and bind-mount something over the path
- use LD_PRELOAD to wrap fopen/open/openat (I'm pretty sure, ready made solutions for this already exist)
I think I would literally recompile libc to patch fopen/open/openat long before I would even begin to consider writing a kernel module to mess with filesystem paths on a per-process basis.
I feel like if you find yourself seriously considering writing a kernel module then you are either contributing to kernel development, or have embarked on an adventure specifically to learn about kernel internals, or have take a very wrong turn.
chroot or namespaces/containers?
Hah
This effort is more useful to up and coming defenders and security researchers than attackers by far.
