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Title: Track Conventions, Not Attack Signatures: Fortifying X86 ABI and System Call Interfaces to Mitigate Code Reuse Attacks
Code Reuse Attacks (CRAs) are dangerous exploitation strategies that allow attackers to compose malicious programs out of existing application and library code gadgets, without requiring code injection. Previously, researchers explored hardware-assisted protection schemes that track attack signa- tures to identify malicious behavior. This paper makes two main contributions. First, we show that previously proposed signature-based schemes are impractical because they do not always distinguish attack patterns from the behavior of benign programs. Second, we demonstrate that instead of tracking attack signatures, a more robust defense mechanism is to track legitimate usage of system calls and ABI compliance in hard- ware, and detect deviations from established conventions as possible attacks. We propose two specific tracking mecha- nisms: the setting of arguments for system calls and register usage across function calls. We demonstrate that our solution severely hinders practical CRAs and completely stops code- reuse execution of sensitive system calls like mprotect. Our solution imposes very low performance overhead and modest design complexity.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2053391
PAR ID:
10326612
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design
Page Range / eLocation ID:
176 to 188
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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