Integrity Policy Enforcement (IPE)

Overview

IPE is a Linux Security Module, which allows for a configurable policy to enforce integrity requirements on the whole system. It attempts to solve the issue of code integrity: that any code being executed (or files being read), are identical to the version that was built by a trusted source. Simply stated, IPE helps the owner of a system ensure that only code they have authorized is allowed to execute.

There are multiple implementations already within the Linux kernel that solve some measure of integrity verification. For instance, device-mapper verity, which ensures integrity for a block device, and fs-verity which is a system that ensures integrity for a filesystem. What these implementations lack is a measure of run-time verification that binaries are sourced from these locations. IPE aims to address this gap.

IPE is separated between two major components: A configurable policy, provided by the LSM ("IPE Core"), and deterministic attributes provided by the kernel to evaluate files against, ("IPE Properties").

What is the value of code integrity?

Code integrity is identified as one of the most effective security mitigations for modern systems. With Private Key Infrastructure and code signing you can effectively control the execution of all binaries on a system to be restricted to a known subset. This eliminates attacks such as:

Linker hijacking (LD_PRELOAD, LD_AUDIT, DLL Injection) Binary rewriting Malicious binary execution / loading

As a result, most of the low effort, high value attacks are mitigated completely.

Use Cases

IPE is designed for use in devices with a specific purpose like embedded systems (e.g. network firewall device in a data center), where all software and configuration is built and provisioned by the owner.

Ideally, a system which leverages IPE is not intended for general purpose computing and does not utilize any software or configuration built by a third party. An ideal system to leverage IPE has both mutable and immutable components, however, all binary executable code is immutable.

For the highest level of security, platform firmware should verify the the kernel and optionally the root filesystem (e.g. via U-Boot verified boot). This allows the entire system to be integrity verified.

Known Gaps

IPE cannot verify the integrity of anonymous executable memory, such as the trampolines created by gcc closures and libffi, or JIT'd code. Unfortunately, as this is dynamically generated code, there is no way for IPE to detect that this code has not been tampered with in transition from where it was built, to where it is running. As a result, IPE is incapable of tackling this problem for dynamically generated code.

IPE cannot verify the integrity of interpreted languages' programs when these scripts invoked via <interpreter> <file> 1. This is because the way interpreters execute these files, the scripts themselves are not evaluated as executable code through one of IPE's hooks. Interpreters can be enlightened to the usage of IPE by trying to mmap a file into executable memory (+X), after opening the file and responding to the error code appropriately. This also applies to included files, or high value files, such as configuration files of critical system components. This specific gap is planned on being addressed within IPE.

1 We are tracking this proposal as a solution for this exact problem.