MazeRunner: Evaluating the Attack Surface of Control-Flow Integrity Policies

Dongrui Zeng, Ben Niu, Gang Tan

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

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) enforces a control-flow graph (CFG) to limit attackers' ability to manipulate runtime control flow. CFI variations, enforcing different CFGs, achieve different degrees of attack surface reduction. To compare the security strength of different CFI policies, measuring the remaining attack surface is critical but challenging. Therefore, we propose MazeRunner, a framework that quantitatively estimates the attack surface of a CFI-hardened program. Methodology-wise, it takes a program's CFG, an attack model, and a security-violation policy as input to discover risky program points by an attack-aware data dependency tracking algorithm. Risky program points and the CFG are used to compute a metric for the remaining attack surface. We evaluate MazeRunner with 3 CFG types, 3 attack models, and 4 security-violation policies against 13 realistic benchmarks, and demonstrate that the new metric achieves higher precision than traditional metrics while maintaining completeness.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2021 IEEE 20th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2021
EditorsLiang Zhao, Neeraj Kumar, Robert C. Hsu, Deqing Zou
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages810-821
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781665416580
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event20th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2021 - Shenyang, China
Duration: Oct 20 2021Oct 22 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2021 IEEE 20th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2021

Conference

Conference20th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2021
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShenyang
Period10/20/2110/22/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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