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Stateful Forward-Edge CFI Enforcement with Intel MPX

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Advanced Computer Architecture (ACA 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 908))

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Abstract

This paper presents a stateful forward-edge CFI mechanism based on a novel use of the Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) technology. To enforce stateful CFI policies, we protect against malicious modification of pointers on the dereference pathes of indirect jumps or function calls by saving these pointers into shadow memory. Intel MPX, which stores pointer’s bounds into shadow memory, offers the capability of managing the copy for these indirect dereferenced pointers. There are two challenges in applying MPX to forward-edge CFI enforcement. First, as MPX is designed to protect against every pointers that may incurs memory errors, MPX incurs unacceptable runtime overhead. Second, the MPX defense has holes when maintaining interoperability with legacy code. We address these challenges by only protecting the pointers on the dereference pathes of indirect function calls and jumps, and making a further check on the loaded pointer value. We have implemented our mechanism on the LLVM compiler and evaluated it on a commodity Intel Skylake machine with MPX support. Evaluation results show that our mechanism is effective in enforcing forward-edge CFI, while incurring acceptable performance overhead.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Shadow memory is a memory space paralleling the normal data space [21,22,23].

  2. 2.

    The control-transfer related pointers can be used to call functions, used as function parameters, used to load pointers and so on.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was supported by the China National Science Fund for Outstanding Young Scholars under grant No. 61522212; National Key R&D Plan under grant No. 2017YFB1001602; Frontier Science Research Projects, Chinese Academy of Science, under grant No. QYZDB-SSW-JSC010; and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grant No. 61521092 and No. 61502459.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hubei University of Arts and Science, Xiangyang, China

    Jun Zhang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Computer Architecture, ICT, CAS, Beijing, China

    Jun Zhang, Boyan Zhao & Mingyu Chen

  3. Institute of Information Engineering, CAS, Beijing, China

    Rui Hou, Wei Song, Zhiyuan Zhan & Dan Meng

  4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jun Zhang, Zhiyuan Zhan, Boyan Zhao & Mingyu Chen

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  1. Jun Zhang
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Correspondence to Jun Zhang .

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  1. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Chao Li

  2. National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China

    Junjie Wu

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Zhang, J. et al. (2018). Stateful Forward-Edge CFI Enforcement with Intel MPX. In: Li, C., Wu, J. (eds) Advanced Computer Architecture. ACA 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 908. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2423-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2423-9_7

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