research-article

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

Authors:

Christopher Liebchen,

Mohaned Qunaibit,

Ahmad-Reza SadeghiAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '15: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 952 - 963

https://doi.org/10.1145/2810103.2813671

Published: 12 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Adversaries 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 contents including security-critical values used to validate control-flow transfers. Our investigation shows that although program analysis and compiler-based mitigations reduce 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.

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Khan SChatterjee BPande STsafrir DMusuvathi MGupta RAbu-Ghazaleh N(2024)Pythia: Compiler-Guided Defense Against Non-Control Data AttacksProceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 310.1145/3620666.3651343(850-866)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
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Index Terms

Losing Control: On the Effectiveness of Control-Flow Integrity under Stack Attacks
1. Security and privacy
  1. Systems security
    1. Operating systems security

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cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '15: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 2015

1750 pages

ISBN:9781450338325

DOI:10.1145/2810103

General Chair:
Indrajit Ray
Colorado State University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Ninghui Li
Purdue University, USA
,
Christopher Kruegel
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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Published: 12 October 2015

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October 12 - 16, 2015

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CCS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 128 of 660 submissions, 19%;

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3620666.3651343
Ma PJi ZYao PWang SRen KRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Enabling Runtime Verification of Causal Discovery Algorithms with Automated Conditional Independence ReasoningProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623348(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3623348
Hashemi MForte DGanji F(2024)Time Is Money, Friend! Timing Side-Channel Attack Against Garbled Circuit ConstructionsApplied Cryptography and Network Security10.1007/978-3-031-54776-8_13(325-354)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54776-8_13
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