SafeFetch: Practical Double-Fetch Protection with Kernel-Fetch Caching

Double-fetch bugs (or vulnerabilities) stem from in-kernel system call execution fetching the same user data twice without proper data (re)sanitization, enabling TOCTTOU attacks and posing a major threat to operating systems security. Existing double-fetch protection systems rely on the MMU to trap on writes to syscall-accessed user pages and provide the kernel with a consistent snapshot of user memory. While this strategy can hinder attacks, it also introduces nontrivial runtime performance overhead due to the cost of trapping/remapping and the coarse (page-granular) write interposition mechanism.

In this paper, we propose SafeFetch, a practical solution to protect the kernel from double-fetch bugs. The key intuition is that most system calls fetch small amounts of user data (if at all), hence caching this data in the kernel can be done at a small performance cost. To this end, SafeFetch creates per-syscall caches to persist fetched user data and replay them when they are fetched again within the same syscall. This strategy neutralizes all double-fetch bugs, while eliminating trapping/remapping overheads and relying on efficient byte-granular interposition. Our Linux prototype evaluation shows SafeFetch can provide comprehensive protection with low performance overheads (e.g., 4.4% geomean on LMBench), significantly outperforming state-of-the-art solutions.