Sandrine Bailleux
authored
At the moment, all BL images share a similar memory layout: they start with their code section, followed by their read-only data section. The two sections are contiguous in memory. Therefore, the end of the code section and the beginning of the read-only data one might share a memory page. This forces both to be mapped with the same memory attributes. As the code needs to be executable, this means that the read-only data stored on the same memory page as the code are executable as well. This could potentially be exploited as part of a security attack. This patch introduces a new build flag called SEPARATE_CODE_AND_RODATA, which isolates the code and read-only data on separate memory pages. This in turn allows independent control of the access permissions for the code and read-only data. This has an impact on memory footprint, as padding bytes need to be introduced between the code and read-only data to ensure the segragation of the two. To limit the memory c...