Reusable Memory Manager

Kenneth Adam Miller kennethadammiller at gmail.com
Wed Apr 22 22:39:23 EDT 2015


So, I have a particular use case that has a lot to do with security.

Basically, we have a intended secure kernel version with grsecurity and
other patches on it, and we have a specific application that has to do data
filtering as an inline reference monitor.

The problem is, there is throughput and design considerations that are
limiting efficiency in the sense that it is highly difficult to make the
system concurrent and also highly difficult to scale-all while also being
secure.

Basically, the memory regions have to be encoded at compile time because of
the way kernel segregation works. This makes the security proof of the
system far more simple and manageable; it's easy to say that no userland
monitor which is being given access to a specific memory region can access
outside of the region to which it is allocated, because it's statically
set. The tradeoff here is pretty severe, because the static settings that
have to be adopted pretty much mean that each particular monitor is given a
specific memory region; if there's a lot of traffic to a specific monitor
type, then that one type will be overwhelmed, but not even at the rate that
the machine itself could support. This is because all the other cores are
potentially sitting unused while the one in this worst case scenario is
running out of memory and not able to dispatch work to more cores.

So my ultimate question is: is there some reusable, dynamic memory
allocation manager that can be used? I'm thinking that there has to, at the
least, be the constructs by which user land processes are managed and
divvied memory by the kernel itself. Does anybody know where that source
would be? Where I can go in order to learn more about that?

What we want is a secure way to dynamically allocate memory from these
static memory page boundaries such that
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