τCFI: Type-assisted control flow integrity for x86-64 binaries

Paul Muntean, Matthias Fischer, Gang Tan, Zhiqiang Lin, Jens Grossklags, Claudia Eckert

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

Programs aiming for low runtime overhead and high availability draw on several object-oriented features available in the C/C++ programming language, such as dynamic object dispatch. However, there is an alarmingly high number of object dispatch (i.e., forward-edge) corruption vulnerabilities, which undercut security in significant ways and are in need of a thorough solution. In this paper, we propose τCFI, an extended control flow integrity (CFI) model that uses both the types and numbers of function parameters to enforce forward- and backward-edge control flow transfers. At a high level, it improves the precision of existing forward-edge recognition approaches by considering the type information of function parameters, which are directly extracted from the application binaries. Therefore, τCFI can be used to harden legacy applications for which source code may not be available. We have evaluated τCFI on real-world binaries including Nginx, NodeJS, Lighttpd, MySql and the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark and demonstrate that τCFI is able to effectively protect these applications from forward- and backward-edge corruptions with low runtime overhead. In direct comparison with state-of-the-art tools, τCFI achieves higher forward-edge caller-callee matching precision.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationResearch in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses - 21st International Symposium, RAID 2018, Proceedings
EditorsMichael Bailey, Sotiris Ioannidis, Manolis Stamatogiannakis, Thorsten Holz
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages423-444
Number of pages22
ISBN (Print)9783030004699
DOIs
StatePublished - 2018
Event21st International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, RAID 2018 - Heraklion, Greece
Duration: Sep 10 2018Sep 12 2018

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11050 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other21st International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, RAID 2018
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityHeraklion
Period9/10/189/12/18

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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