V-240521

Discussion

Some adversaries launch attacks with the intent of executing code in non-executable regions of memory or in memory locations that are prohibited. Security safeguards employed to protect memory include, for example, data execution prevention and address space layout randomization. Data execution prevention safeguards can either be hardware-enforced or software-enforced with hardware providing the greater strength of mechanism. Examples of attacks are buffer overflow attacks.

Check Content

Verify "randomize_va_space" has not been changed from the default "1" setting.

# sysctl kernel.randomize_va_space

If the return value is not "kernel.randomize_va_space = 1", this is a finding.