Paper Info
Title
Enforcing Unique Code Target Property for Control-Flow Integrity.
Abstract
The goal of control-flow integrity (CFI) is to stop control-hijacking attacks by ensuring that each indirect control-flow transfer (ICT) jumps to its legitimate target. However, existing implementations of CFI have fallen short of this goal because their approaches are inaccurate and as a result, the set of allowable targets for an ICT instruction is too large, making illegal jumps possible. In this paper, we propose the Unique Code Target (UCT) property for CFI. Namely, for each invocation of an ICT instruction, there should be one and only one valid target. We develop a prototype called uCFI to enforce this new property. During compilation, uCFI identifies the sensitive instructions that influence ICT and instruments the program to record necessary execution context. At runtime, uCFI monitors the program execution in a different process, and performs points-to analysis by interpreting sensitive instructions using the recorded execution context in a memory safe manner. It checks runtime ICT targets against the analysis results to detect CFI violations. We apply uCFI to SPEC benchmarks and 2 servers (nginx and vsftpd) to evaluate its efficacy of enforcing UCT and its overhead. We also test uCFI against control-hijacking attacks, including 5 real-world exploits, 1 proof of concept COOP attack, and 2 synthesized attacks that bypass existing defenses. The results show that uCFI strictly enforces the UCT property for protected programs, successfully detects all attacks, and introduces less than 10% performance overhead.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3243734.3243797
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Keywords
Field
DocType
Control-flow integrity, Unique code target, Performance, Intel PT
Computer security,Computer science,Server,Control-flow integrity,Implementation,Exploit,Proof of concept,Information and Communications Technology,Spec#
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5693-0
6
0.41
References 
Authors
46
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hong Hu1936.07
Chenxiong Qian21538.76
Carter Yagemann372.79
Simon P. Chung416513.46
William R. Harris529115.38
Taesoo Kim680951.85
Wenke Lee79351628.83