Research on Defending Code Reuse Attack Based on Binary Rewriting

Abstract

At present, code reuse attacks, such as Return Oriented Programming (ROP), execute attacks through the code of the application itself, bypassing the traditional defense mechanism and seriously threatening the security of computer software. The existing two mainstream defense mechanisms, Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), are vulnerable to information disclosure attacks, and Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) will bring high overhead to programs. At the same time, due to the widespread use of software of unknown origin, there is no source code provided or available, so it is not always possible to secure the source code. In this paper, we propose FRCFI, an effective method based on binary rewriting to prevent code reuse attacks. FRCFI first disrupts the program's memory space layout through function shuffling and NOP insertion, then verifies the execution of the control-flow branch instruction ret and indirect call/jmp instructions to ensure that the target address is not modified by attackers. Experiment show shows that FRCFI can effectively defend against code reuse attacks. After randomization, the survival rate of gadgets is only 1.7%, and FRCFI adds on average 6.1% runtime overhead on SPEC CPU2006 benchmark programs.