New approach to return-oriented programming exploitation mitigation

Abstract

ABSTRACTPreventing software exploitation is an incredibly important goal for cyber security professionals, and huge amounts of time, effort, and money are devoted to this cause worldwide. A key stage of the exploitation process is gaining control of the execution flow of a target process so as to redirect it to the attacker’s illicit shellcode; most of the exploit mitigations currently in use are targeted at increasing the difficulty of this act. This article presents a new method for preventing control flow hijacking that provides a more robust defensive posture than existing options and is achieved by dereferencing function and return pointers to evaluate their contents rather than the extant approach of evaluating the pointers themselves.