Abstract
Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Control Flow Integrity (CFI) have been regarded as the most effective defenses against control flow hijacking attacks. However, researchers have recently shown that data-oriented attacks can circumvent both ASLR and CFI, and are even Turing-complete. These attacks often leverage encapsulated data structures to achieve malicious behaviors. To defeat data structure oriented attacks (DSOA), we propose data structure layout randomization techniques. Our method not only randomizes the data structure layout at compile time, but also inserts the padding bytes to increase entropy. Experimental results show that our method can defeat DSOA with low performance overhead (2.1% on average).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Openssl speed. http://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/speed.html
Pax aslr documentation. http://pax.grsecurity.net/docs/aslr.txt
Abadi, M., Budiu, M., Erlingsson, U., Ligatti, J.: Control-flow integrity. In: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2005) (2005)
Backes, M., Holz, T., Kollenda, B., Koppe, P., Nürnberger, S., Pewny, J.: You can run but you can’t read: preventing disclosure exploits in executable code. In: ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2014) (2014)
Backes, M., Nürnberger, S.: Oxymoron: making fine-grained memory randomization practical by allowing code sharing. In: USENIX Security Symposium (Security 2014) (2014)
Bhatkar, E., Duvarney, D.C., Sekar, R.: Address obfuscation: an efficient approach to combat a broad range of memory error exploits. In: Proceedings of the 12th USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 105–120 (2003)
Bhatkar, S., Sekar, R.: Data space randomization. In: International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2008) (2008)
Bhatkar, S., Sekar, R., DuVarney, D.C.: Efficient techniques for comprehensive protection from memory error exploits. In: Proceedings of the 14th Conference on USENIX Security Symposium, Berkeley, CA, USA, vol. 14, p. 17 (2005)
Castro, M., Costa, M., Harris, T.: Securing software by enforcing data-flow integrity. In: Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2006) (2006)
Davi, L., Dmitrienko, A., Egele, M., Fischer, T., Holz, T., Hund, R., Nrnberger, S., Sadeghi, A.-R.: Mocfi: a framework to mitigate control-flow attacks on smartphones. In: Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2012) (2012)
Hu, H., Chua, Z. L., Adrian, S., Saxena, P., Liang, Z.: Automatic generation of data-oriented exploits. In: Proceedings of the 24th USENIX Security Symposium (Security 2015) (2015)
Hu, H., Shinde, S., Adrian, S., Chua, Z.L., Saxena, P., Liang, Z.: Data-oriented programming: on the expressiveness of non-control data attacks. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2016) (2016)
Jim, T., Morrisett, J.G., Grossman, D., Hicks, M.W., Cheney, J., Wang, Y.: Cyclone: a safe dialect of C. In: General Track of the Annual Conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference, ATEC 2002 (2002)
Nagarakatte, S., Zhao, J., Martin, M.M., Zdancewic, S.: Softbound: highly compatible and complete spatial memory safety for C. In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2009) (2009)
Necula, G.C., McPeak, S., Weimer, W.: CCured: type-safe retrofitting of legacy code. In: 29th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2002) (2002)
Pax Team: Pax address space layout randomization (aslr). http://pax.grsecurity.net/docs/aslr.txt
Wang, Z., Jiang, X.: Hypersafe: a lightweight approach to provide lifetime hypervisor control-flow integrity. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2010) (2010)
Zhang, C., Wei, T., Chen, Z., Duan, L., McCamant, S., Szekeres, L., Song, D., Zou, W.: Practical control flow integrity and randomization for binary executables. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2013) (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chen, Z., Han, H. (2017). Attack Mitigation by Data Structure Randomization. In: Cuppens, F., Wang, L., Cuppens-Boulahia, N., Tawbi, N., Garcia-Alfaro, J. (eds) Foundations and Practice of Security. FPS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10128. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51966-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51966-1_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-51965-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51966-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)