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AlmaLinux OS 9 must clear the page allocator to prevent use-after-free attacks.

An XCCDF Rule

Description

Poisoning writes an arbitrary value to freed pages, so any modification or reference to that page after being freed or before being initialized will be detected and prevented. This prevents many types of use-after-free vulnerabilities at little performance cost. This also prevents data leaks and detects corrupted memory.

ID
SV-269293r1050175_rule
Version
ALMA-09-024110
Severity
Medium
References
Updated

Remediation Templates

A Manual Procedure

Configure AlmaLinux OS 9 to enable page poisoning with the following commands:

$ grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="page_poison=1"

Add or modify the following line in "/etc/default/grub" to ensure the configuration survives kernel updates:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="page_poison=1"