skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Randezvous: Making Randomization Effective on MCUs
Internet-of-Things devices such as autonomous vehicular sensors, medical devices, and industrial cyber-physical systems commonly rely on small, resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). MCU software is typically written in C and is prone to memory safety vulnerabilities that are exploitable by remote attackers to launch code reuse attacks and code/control data leakage attacks. We present Randezvous, a highly performant diversification-based mitigation to such attacks and their brute force variants on ARM MCUs. Atop code/data layout randomization and an efficient execute-only code approach, Randezvous creates decoy pointers to camouflage control data in memory; code pointers in the stack are then protected by a diversified shadow stack, local-to-global variable promotion, and return address nullification. Moreover, Randezvous adds a novel delayed reboot mechanism to slow down persistent attacks and mitigates control data spraying attacks via global guards. We demonstrate Randezvous’s security by statistically modeling leakage-equipped brute force attacks under Randezvous, crafting a proof-of-concept exploit that shows Randezvous’s efficacy, and studying a real-world CVE. Our evaluation of Randezvous shows low overhead on three benchmark suites and two applications.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1955498 1652280
PAR ID:
10421589
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
Page Range / eLocation ID:
28 to 41
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; (, GLOBECOM 2020 - 2020 IEEE Global Communications Conference)
    null (Ed.)
    Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been increasingly integrated into our daily life. However, such smart devices suffer a broad attack surface. Particularly, attacks targeting the device software at runtime are challenging to defend against if IoT devices use resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). TrustZone-M, a TrustZone extension for MCUs, is an emerging security technique fortifying MCU based IoT devices. This paper presents the first security analysis of potential software security issues in TrustZone-M enabled MCUs. We explore the stack-based buffer overflow (BOF) attack for code injection, return-oriented programming (ROP) attack, heap-based BOF attack, format string attack, and attacks against Non-secure Callable (NSC) functions in the context of TrustZone-M. We validate these attacks using the Microchip SAM L11 MCU, which uses the ARM Cortex-M23 processor with the TrustZone-M technology. Strategies to mitigate these software attacks are also discussed. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; (, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems)
    Cybersecurity attacks on embedded devices for industrial control systems and cyber-physical systems may cause catastrophic physical damage as well as economic loss. This could be achieved by infecting device binaries with malware that modifies the physical characteristics of the system operation. Mitigating such attacks benefits from reverse engineering tools that recover sufficient semantic knowledge in terms of mathematical equations of the implemented algorithm. Conventional reverse engineering tools can decompile binaries to low-level code, but offer little semantic insight. This article proposes the REMaQE automated framework for reverse engineering of math equations from binary executables. Improving over state-of-the-art, REMaQE handles equation parameters accessed via registers, the stack, global memory, or pointers, and can reverse engineer equations from object-oriented implementations such as C++ classes. Using REMaQE, we discovered a bug in the Linux kernel thermal monitoring tool “tmon.” To evaluate REMaQE, we generate a dataset of 25,096 binaries with math equations implemented in C and Simulink. REMaQE successfully recovers a semantically matching equation for all 25,096 binaries. REMaQE executes in 0.48 seconds on average and in up to 2 seconds for complex equations. Real-time execution enables integration in an interactive math-oriented reverse engineering workflow. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; (, 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN))
    In the recent past, there has been a rapid increase in attacks on consumer Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Several attacks currently focus on easy targets for exploitation, such as weak configurations (weak default passwords). However, with governments, industries, and organizations proposing new laws and regulations to reduce and prevent such easy targets in the IoT space, attackers will move to more subtle exploits in these devices. Memory corruption vulnerabilities are a significant class of vulnerabilities in software security through which attackers can gain control of the entire system. Numerous memory corruption vulnerabilities have been found in IoT firmware already deployed in the consumer market. This paper presents an approach for exploiting stack-based buffer-overflow attacks in IoT firmware, to hijack the device remotely. To show the feasibility of this approach, we demonstrate exploiting a common network software application, Connman, used widely in IoT firmware such as Samsung smart TVs. A series of experiments are reported on, including: crashing and executing arbitrary code in the targeted software application in a controlled environment, adopting the attacks in uncontrolled environments (with standard software defenses such as W⊕X and ASLR enabled), and installing publicly available IoT firmware that uses this software application on a Raspberry Pi. The presented exploits demonstrate the ease in which an adversary can control IoT devices. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2023))
    As control-flow protection techniques are widely deployed, it is difficult for attackers to modify control data, like function pointers, to hijack program control flow. Instead, data-only attacks corrupt security-critical non-control data (critical data), and can bypass all control-flow protections to revive severe attacks. Previous works have explored various methods to help construct or prevent data-only attacks. However, no solution can automatically detect program-specific critical data. In this paper, we identify an important category of critical data, syscall-guard variables, and propose a set of solutions to automatically detect such variables in a scalable manner. Syscall-guard variables determine to invoke security-related system calls (syscalls), and altering them will allow attackers to request extra privileges from the operating system. We propose branch force, which intentionally flips every conditional branch during the execution and checks whether new security-related syscalls are invoked. If so, we conduct data-flow analysis to estimate the feasibility to flip such branches through common memory errors. We build a tool, VIPER, to implement our ideas. VIPER successfully detects 34 previously unknown syscall-guard variables from 13 programs. We build four new data-only attacks on sqlite and v8, which execute arbitrary command or delete arbitrary file. VIPER completes its analysis within five minutes for most programs, showing its practicality for spotting syscall-guard variables. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (S&P))
    Attackers leverage memory corruption vulnerabilities to establish primitives for reading from or writing to the address space of a vulnerable process. These primitives form the foundation for code-reuse and data-oriented attacks. While various defenses against the former class of attacks have proven effective, mitigation of the latter remains an open problem. In this paper, we identify various shortcomings of the x86 architecture regarding memory isolation, and leverage virtualization to build an effective defense against data-oriented attacks. Our approach, called xMP, provides (in-guest) selective memory protection primitives that allow VMs to isolate sensitive data in user or kernel space in disjoint xMP domains. We interface the Xen altp2m subsystem with the Linux memory management system, lending VMs the flexibility to define custom policies. Contrary to conventional approaches, xMP takes advantage of virtualization extensions, but after initialization, it does not require any hypervisor intervention. To ensure the integrity of in-kernel management information and pointers to sensitive data within isolated domains, xMP protects pointers with HMACs bound to an immutable context, so that integrity validation succeeds only in the right context. We have applied xMP to protect the page tables and process credentials of the Linux kernel, as well as sensitive data in various user-space applications. Overall, our evaluation shows that xMP introduces minimal overhead for real-world workloads and applications, and offers effective protection against data-oriented attacks. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email