Using LBR (Last Branch Record) feature to detect ret2usr (return-to-user) attack w/ MMU paging structure corruption

SMEP (Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention) is a mitigation that aims to prevent the CPU from running code from user-mode while in kernel-mode, however this post (Windows 8 Kernel Memory Protections Bypass) presents a generic technique for exploiting kernel vulnerabilities with bypassing SMEP. Unlike my previous post (Page Table Structure Corruption Attacks - How to Mitigate it?) that presented a mitigation to that attack, this post will present a solution to detect such a ret2usr attack due to MMU paging structure corruption.

Defending Against ret2dir Attacks (partially) with Virtualization Technology?

I was so excited when recently reading the paper (ret2dir: Rethinking Kernel Isolation) from Vasileios P. Kemerlis. This post is basically going to introduce the idea of ret2dir attack, and how to prevent such an attack with hardware virtualization technology, actually partially.