Publications

Losing Control: On the Effectiveness of Control-Flow Integrity under Stack Attacks

AuthorConti, Mauro; Crane, Stephen; Davi, Lucas; Franz, Michael; Larsen, Per; Liebchen, Christopher; Negro, Marco; Qunaibit, Mohaned; Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza
Date2015
TypeConference Proceedings
AbstractAdversaries exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities to hijack a program's control flow and gain arbitrary code execution. One promising mitigation, control-flow integrity (CFI), has been the subject of extensive research in the past decade. One of the core findings is that adversaries can construct Turing-complete code-reuse attacks against coarse-grained CFI policies because they admit control flows that are not part of the original program. This insight led the research community to focus on fine-grained CFI implementations. In this paper we show how to exploit heap-based vulnerabilities to control the stack content including security-critical values used to validate control-flow transfers. Our investigation shows that although program analysis and compiler-based mitigations reduced stack-based vulnerabilities, stack-based memory corruption remains an open problem. Using the Chromium web browser we demonstrate real-world attacks against various CFI implementations: 1) against CFI implementations under Windows 32-bit by exploiting unprotected context switches, and 2) against state-of-the-art fine-grained CFI implementations (IFCC and VTV) in the two premier open-source compilers under Unix-like operating systems. Both 32 and 64-bit x86 CFI checks are vulnerable to stack manipulation. Finally, we provide an exploit technique against the latest shadow stack implementation.
In22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
PartnTUD-CS-2015-1168
Urlhttps://tubiblio.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/104151