Return-oriented Programming Attacks Research Articles

Zero-Sum Defender: Fast and Space-Efficient Defense against Return-Oriented Programming Attacks

Recently, return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks have been rapidly increasing. In this letter, we introduce a fast and space-efficient defense technique, called zero-sum defender, that can respond against general ROP attacks. Our technique generates additional codes, at compile time, just before return instructions to check whether the execution has been abused by ROP attacks. We achieve very low runtime overhead with very small increase in file size. In our experimental results, performance overhead is 1.7%, and file size overhead is 4.5%.

A Function Level Randomization Technique to Mitigate ROP Attacks

ROP (Return-Oriented Programming) is a kind of attack technique which makes use of the existing binary code of target systems. ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) is widely used to protect systems from buffer-overflow attacks by introducing artificial diversity to software. With ASLR software can be immune from ROP attacks to some extent. Due to the fact that ASLR cant randomize base addresses of executables code segments and its utility on 32-bit architectures is limited by the number of bits available for address randomization, attackers can successfully exploit a target system by using brute force in limited time. Thus, we proposed FLR, a function level randomization technique to mitigate ROP attacks. FLR randomly permutes functions in executables, making attackers assumptions on executables incorrect. We implemented a prototype of FLR and randomized ten executables. ROP attacks succeeded without FLR and failed with FLR.

Defending return‐oriented programming based on virtualization techniques

ABSTRACTOver the past few years, return‐oriented programming (ROP) has drawn great attention of both academia and industry. Because of its Turing completeness, ROP reuses short instruction sequences already present in the victim program's address space to perform arbitrary computation. Hence, it can successfully bypass state‐of‐the‐art code integrity check mechanisms. In this paper, we look into using virtualization technologies to defeat return‐oriented programming. We design and implement HyperCropII, a virtualization‐based automatic runtime approach to defend such attacks. ROP attackers extract short instruction sequences ending in ret called “gadgets” and craft stack content to “chain” these gadgets together. We observe that a key characteristic of ROP is to fill the stack with plenty of addresses that are within the range of the program's libraries. Accordingly, we inspect the content of the stack to see if a potential ROP attack exists and quarantine the damages for further security purposes. We have implemented a proof‐of‐concept system based on the open source Xen hypervisor. The evaluation results exhibit that our solution is effective and efficient. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.