Fabian Kilger

dblp:238/0020 · DBLP profile ↗
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2ranked-venue papers
1as first author
2since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0004-7233-4250ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Security and privacy · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 State of Browser Process-Isolation: The Same-Site Weakness
Fabian Kilger, Hannah Fischer, Adrian Staeves, Robin Marchart, Josef Schönberger, Fabian Franzen
SP1
2024 ISLAB: Immutable Memory Management Metadata for Commodity Operating System Kernels
abstract
Kernel memory allocators maintain several metadata structures optimized for efficiently managing system memory. However, existing implementations adopt either weak or no protection at all to ensure the integrity of said metadata in the presence of memory errors. In this paper, we first demonstrate how existing memory hardening schemes fall short against several in-kernel memory corruption scenarios. We then present ISLAB: a set of novel (slab-based) heap hardening techniques that aim to ensure the integrity of the memory managed by the kernel, and minimize the incurred runtime, and memory, overhead. ISLAB prevents memory corruption exploits by segregating metadata from within corruptible memory objects into shadow memory. It also relies on a novel SMAP-assisted memory isolation framework, called kSMAP, to protect allocator metadata against adversaries with stronger memory access capabilities. We implemented and evaluated ISLAB atop SLUB, the default slab allocator in Linux, and equipped it with kSMAP to protect process credentials, a popular target in kernel exploitation. Our experiments show that ISLAB incurs no runtime overhead in realistic benchmarks, and moderate overhead in stress tests. Lastly, we show how ISLAB's approach can be generalized to protect the integrity of other kernel subsystems that use corruptible metadata for memory management, such as linked lists.
Marius Momeu, Fabian Kilger, Christopher Roemheld, Simon Schnückel, Sergej Proskurin, Michalis Polychronakis, Vasileios P. Kemerlis
AsiaCCS2