research-article

Filter-resistant code injection on ARM

Authors:

Pieter Philippaerts,

Frank Piessens,

Thomas WalterAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '09: Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security

Pages 11 - 20

https://doi.org/10.1145/1653662.1653665

Published: 09 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Code injections attacks are one of the most powerful and important classes of attacks on software. In such attacks, the attacker sends malicious input to a software application, where it is stored in memory. The malicious input is chosen in such a way that its representation in memory is also a valid representation of a machine code program that performs actions chosen by the attacker. The attacker then triggers a bug in the application to divert the control flow to this injected machine code. A typical action of the injected code is to launch a command interpreter shell, and hence the malicious input is often called shellcode.

Attacks are usually performed against network facing applications, and such applications often perform validations or encodings on input. Hence, a typical hurdle for attackers, is that the shellcode has to pass one or more filtering methods before it is stored in the vulnerable application's memory space. Clearly, for a code injection attack to succeed, the malicious input must survive such validations and transformations. Alphanumeric input (consisting only of letters and digits) is typically very robust for this purpose: it passes most filters and is untouched by most transformations.

This paper studies the power of alphanumeric shellcode on the ARM 32 bit RISC processor. It shows that the subset of ARM machine code programs that (when interpreted as data) consist only of alphanumerical characters is a Turing complete subset. This is a non-trivial result, as the number of instructions that consist only of alphanumeric characters is very limited. To craft useful exploit code (and to achieve Turing completeness), several tricks are needed, including the use of self-modifying code.

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Cited By

Ghosh SBhatnagar MSaad WPanigrahi B(2021)Defending False Data Injection on State Estimation Over Fading Wireless ChannelsIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2020.303137816(1424-1439)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2020.3031378
Lin JYu WYang X(2016)Towards Multistep Electricity Prices in Smart Grid Electricity MarketsIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2015.238847927:1(286-302)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TPDS.2015.2388479
Yang XLin JYu WMoulema PFu XZhao W(2015)A Novel En-Route Filtering Scheme Against False Data Injection Attacks in Cyber-Physical Networked SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2013.17764:1(4-18)Online publication date: Jan-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2013.177
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Index Terms

Filter-resistant code injection on ARM
1. Security and privacy
  1. Systems security
    1. Operating systems security

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '09: Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security

November 2009

664 pages

ISBN:9781605588940

DOI:10.1145/1653662

General Chair:
Ehab Al-Shaer
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Somesh Jha
University of Wisconsin, USA
,
Angelos D. Keromytis
Columbia University, USA and Symantec Research Labs Europe, France

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 November 2009

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CCS '09: 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2009

November 9 - 13, 2009

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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Cited By

Ghosh SBhatnagar MSaad WPanigrahi B(2021)Defending False Data Injection on State Estimation Over Fading Wireless ChannelsIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2020.303137816(1424-1439)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2020.3031378
Lin JYu WYang X(2016)Towards Multistep Electricity Prices in Smart Grid Electricity MarketsIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2015.238847927:1(286-302)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TPDS.2015.2388479
Yang XLin JYu WMoulema PFu XZhao W(2015)A Novel En-Route Filtering Scheme Against False Data Injection Attacks in Cyber-Physical Networked SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2013.17764:1(4-18)Online publication date: Jan-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2013.177
Younan YJoosen WPiessens F(2012)Runtime countermeasures for code injection attacks against C and C++ programsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/2187671.218767944:3(1-28)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2187671.2187679
Ray DLigatti JField JHicks M(2012)Defining code-injection attacksProceedings of the 39th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages10.1145/2103656.2103678(179-190)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2103656.2103678
Ray DLigatti J(2012)Defining code-injection attacksACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2103621.210367847:1(179-190)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2103621.2103678
Snow KKrishnan SMonrose FProvos NWagner D(2011)SHELLOSProceedings of the 20th USENIX conference on Security10.5555/2028067.2028076(9-9)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2028067.2028076
Song YZhang YSun YYan J(2011)Unicode-proof code injection attack on Windows CE — A novel approach of evading intrusion detection system for mobile network2011 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Communication Software and Networks10.1109/ICCSN.2011.6013556(116-120)Online publication date: May-2011
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSN.2011.6013556
Younan YPhilippaerts PPiessens FJoosen WLachmund SWalter T(2011)Filter-resistant code injection on ARMJournal in Computer Virology10.1007/s11416-010-0146-07:3(173-188)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11416-010-0146-0
Cha SPak BBrumley DLipton RAl-Shaer EKeromytis AShmatikov V(2010)Platform-independent programsProceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security10.1145/1866307.1866369(547-558)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1866307.1866369
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