Articles tagged windows windows-internals

  1. Windows 10 KVAS and Software SMEP


    Kernel Virtual Address Shadow (KVAS) is the Windows implementation of Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI). It was introduced to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability, which allowed an attacker that could execute code in user mode to leak out data from the kernel by abusing a side channel. While there are plenty of papers and blog posts on Meltdown and KVAS, there isn't much info on an interesting feature that KVAS enables: software SMEP. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your interest level in this post and Windows internals, understanding how software SMEP works requires knowledge of x86_64 paging, regular SMEP, and KVAS, so I'll be getting into those topics enough to give you an understanding of the underlying technology. Near the end I'll be running some experiments to show the internals of what I covered in the technical sections prior.

    x64 Paging on Windows

    First, I'm going to dive into a short introduction to x86_64 (4-level) paging, the structures involved, and WinDbg commands to interact with the page hierarchy, just so the experiments later on are more understandable; plus a lot of this information is almost never presented together, so I think collecting it in a here's what you need to know format is useful. If you want more info consult the Intel manuals or check out Connor McGarr's blog. Connor does a great job of explaining the basics, so you may want to read his post over before continuing here if you don't already have at least a vague understanding of multi-level paging.

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