In a course (CA644) we were asked to add a new syscall to the Linux kernel.
As I believe that knowledge should be as free and as accessible as possible, I thought I have to at least publish our results. Another (though minor) reason is that the society -to some extend- pays for me doing science so I believe that the society deserves to at least see the results.
The need to actually publish that is not very big since a lot of information on how to do that exists already. However, that is mostly outdated. A good article is from macboy but it misses to mention a minor fact: The syscall() function is variadic so that it takes as many arguments as you give it.
So the abstract of the paper, that I’ve written together with Nosmo, reads:
This paper shows how to build a recent Linux kernel from scratch, how to add a new system call to it and how to implement new functionality easily.
The chosen functionality is to retrieve the stack protecting canary so that mitigation of buffer overflow attacks can be circumvented.
And you can download the PDF here.
If it’s not interesting for you content wise, it might be interesting from a technical point of view: The PDF has files attached, so that you don’t need to do the boring stuff yourself but rather save working files and modify them. That is achieved using the embedfile package.
\usepackage{embedfile} % Provides \embedfile[filename=foo, desc={bar}]{file} [...] \embedfile[filespec=writetest.c, mimetype=text/x-c,desc={Program which uses the new systemcall}]{../code/userland/writetest.c}% |
If your PDF client doesn’t allow you save the files (Evince does 🙂 ), you might want to use pdftk $PDF unpack_files in some empty directory.
