jacke / zeromaps

A "living" Linux process with no memory

A "living" Linux process with no memory

tl;dr

• thread1 goes into uninterruptible sleep
• thread2 unmaps everything and segfaults
• segv can't kill the process because of thread1's D state
• /proc/pid/maps is now empty
• ???
• PROFIT!!!

Implementation details

This code gets a list of all memory maps from /proc/self/maps, then creates a new executable map where it jits some code that calls munmap() on each of the maps it just got, and finally on the map it's on. This is just a quick example with no portability in mind, so the source code contains the actual bytes that would be emitted by a x64 compiler. After unmapping the final map, where the jit code lies, there's no new instruction to execute and a segfault is raised.

This segfault can't kill the entire process if one thread is stuck in uninterruptible sleep. To reliably send a thread in such state, we create a simple FUSE filesystem in python, in which doing anything on a particular file will block until a key is pressed.

This code also does its own "linking" to make sure that the list of maps doesn't get unmapped too early.

Requirements

• a c compiler
• python2 + fuse
• x64
• a modern Linux with no vsyscall page (this page is too high up and munmap would return EINVAL)

Why

I don't know. I thought it was funny.