Ard Biesheuvel of Linaro submitted a V2 5-part patch to the EDK2 project, to harden UEFI more!
This is a proof of concept implementation that removes all executable permissions from writable memory regions, which greatly enhances security. It is based on Jiewen’s recent work, which is a step in the right direction, but still leaves most of memory exploitable due to the default R+W+X permissions. The idea is that the implementation of the CPU arch protocol goes over the memory map and removes exec permissions from all regions that are not already marked as ‘code. This requires some preparatory work to ensure that the DxeCore itself is covered by a BootServicesCode region, not a BootServicesData region. Exec permissions are re-granted selectively, when the PE/COFF loader allocates the space for it. Combined with Jiewen’s code/data split, this removes all RWX mapped regions.
Changes since v1:
– allocate code pages for PE/COFF images in PeiCore, so that DxeCore pages have the expected memory type (as suggested by Jiewen)
– add patch to inhibit page table updates while syncing the GCD memory space map with the page tables
– add PCD to set memory protection policy, which allows the policy for reserved and ACPI/NVS memory to be configured separately
– move attribute manipulation into DxeCore page allocation code: this way, we should be able to solve the EBC case by allocating BootServicesCode pool memory explicitly.
Firmware Security 