How are stack canary pollutions logged?

Stack smashing is detected by libssp, which is part of gcc. It tries very hard to output the message to a terminal, and only if that fails does it log to the system log — so in practice you’ll see buffer overflow messages in the logs for daemons and perhaps GUI applications.

Once it’s output its message, libssp tries a variety of ways to exit, including crashing the application; this might be caught by one of the abnormal exit loggers, but that’s not guaranteed.


Modern Linux distributions like CentOS/Fedora set up a crash handling daemon (e.g. systemd-coredump or abortd), by default.

Thus, when your program terminates in an abnormal fashion (segfault, uncaught exception, abort, illegal instruction etc.) this event is registered and logged by that daemon. Thus, you find some messages in the system journal and possibly a reference to a directory with some additional details (e.g. core file, logs, etc.).

Example

$ cat test_stack_protector.c 
#include <string.h>

int f(const char *q)
{
  char s[10];
  strcpy(s, q);
  return s[0] + s[1];
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  return f(argv[1]);
}

Compile:

$ gcc -Wall -fstack-protector test_stack_protector.c -o test_stack_protector

Execute:

$ ./test_stack_protector 'hello world'
*** stack smashing detected ***: ./test_stack_protector terminated
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib64/libc.so.6(+0x7c8dc)[0x7f885b4388dc]
/lib64/libc.so.6(__fortify_fail+0x37)[0x7f885b4dfaa7]
/lib64/libc.so.6(__fortify_fail+0x0)[0x7f885b4dfa70]
./test_stack_protector[0x400599]
./test_stack_protector[0x4005bd]
/lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xea)[0x7f885b3dc50a]
./test_stack_protector[0x40049a]
======= Memory map: ========
00400000-00401000 r-xp 00000000 00:28 1151979                            /home/juser/program/stackprotect/test_stack_protector
00600000-00601000 r--p 00000000 00:28 1151979                            /home/juser/program/stackprotect/test_stack_protector
00601000-00602000 rw-p 00001000 00:28 1151979                            /home/juser/program/stackprotect/test_stack_protector
0067c000-0069d000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0                                  [heap]
7f885b1a5000-7f885b1bb000 r-xp 00000000 00:28 1052100                    /usr/lib64/libgcc_s-7-20170915.so.1
7f885b1bb000-7f885b3ba000 ---p 00016000 00:28 1052100                    /usr/lib64/libgcc_s-7-20170915.so.1
7f885b3ba000-7f885b3bb000 r--p 00015000 00:28 1052100                    /usr/lib64/libgcc_s-7-20170915.so.1
7f885b3bb000-7f885b3bc000 rw-p 00016000 00:28 1052100                    /usr/lib64/libgcc_s-7-20170915.so.1
7f885b3bc000-7f885b583000 r-xp 00000000 00:28 945348                     /usr/lib64/libc-2.25.so
7f885b583000-7f885b783000 ---p 001c7000 00:28 945348                     /usr/lib64/libc-2.25.so
7f885b783000-7f885b787000 r--p 001c7000 00:28 945348                     /usr/lib64/libc-2.25.so
7f885b787000-7f885b789000 rw-p 001cb000 00:28 945348                     /usr/lib64/libc-2.25.so
7f885b789000-7f885b78d000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
7f885b78d000-7f885b7b4000 r-xp 00000000 00:28 945341                     /usr/lib64/ld-2.25.so
7f885b978000-7f885b97b000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
7f885b9b0000-7f885b9b3000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
7f885b9b3000-7f885b9b4000 r--p 00026000 00:28 945341                     /usr/lib64/ld-2.25.so
7f885b9b4000-7f885b9b6000 rw-p 00027000 00:28 945341                     /usr/lib64/ld-2.25.so
7ffc59966000-7ffc59987000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0                          [stack]
7ffc5999c000-7ffc5999f000 r--p 00000000 00:00 0                          [vvar]
7ffc5999f000-7ffc599a1000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0                          [vdso]
ffffffffff600000-ffffffffff601000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0                  [vsyscall]
zsh: abort (core dumped)  ./test_stack_protector 'hello world'

The exit status is 134 which is 128+6, i.e. 128 plus the abort signal number.

The system journal:

Oct 16 20:57:59 example.org audit[17645]: ANOM_ABEND auid=1000 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=3 subj=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 pid=17645 comm="test_stack_prot" exe="/home/juser/program/stackprotect/test_stack_protector" sig=6 res=1
Oct 16 20:57:59 example.org systemd[1]: Started Process Core Dump (PID 17646/UID 0).
Oct 16 20:57:59 example.org audit[1]: SERVICE_START pid=1 uid=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295 subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='unit=systemd-coredump@21-17646-0 comm="systemd" exe="/usr/lib/systemd/systemd" hostname=? addr=? terminal=? res=success'
Oct 16 20:57:59 example.org systemd-coredump[17647]: Process 17645 (test_stack_prot) of user 1000 dumped core.

                           Stack trace of thread 17645:
                           #0  0x00007f885b3f269b raise (libc.so.6)
                           #1  0x00007f885b3f44a0 abort (libc.so.6)
                           #2  0x00007f885b4388e1 __libc_message (libc.so.6)
                           #3  0x00007f885b4dfaa7 __fortify_fail (libc.so.6)
                           #4  0x00007f885b4dfa70 __stack_chk_fail (libc.so.6)
                           #5  0x0000000000400599 f (test_stack_protector)
                           #6  0x00000000004005bd main (test_stack_protector)
                           #7  0x00007f885b3dc50a __libc_start_main (libc.so.6)
                           #8  0x000000000040049a _start (test_stack_protector)
Oct 16 20:57:59 example.org audit[1]: SERVICE_STOP pid=1 uid=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295 subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='unit=systemd-coredump@21-17646-0 comm="systemd" exe="/usr/lib/systemd/systemd" hostname=? addr=? terminal=? res=success'
Oct 16 20:58:00 example.org abrt-notification[17696]: Process 17645 (test_stack_protector) crashed in __fortify_fail()

That means you get logging from the auditd auditing daemon and the systemd-coredump crash handler.

To verify whether a crash handling daemon is configured you can check /proc, e.g.:

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
|/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-coredump %P %u %g %s %t %c %e

(everything tested on Fedora 26, x86-64)

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