SigFree: A signature-free buffer overflow attack blocker

Xinran Wang, Chi Chun Pan, Peng Liu, Sencun Zhu

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

62 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose SigFree, a realtime, signature-free, out-of-the-box, application layer blocker for preventing buffer overflow attacks, one of the most serious cyber security threats. SigFree can filter out code-injection buffer overflow attack messages targeting at various Internet services such as web service. Motivated by the observation that buffer overflow attacks typically contain executables whereas legitimate client requests never contain executables in most Internet services, SigFree blocks attacks by detecting the presence of code. SigFree first blindly dissembles and extracts instruction sequences from a request. It then applies a novel technique called code abstraction, which uses data flow anomaly to prune useless instructions in an instruction sequence. Finally it compares the number of useful instructions to a threshold to determine if this instruction sequence contains code. SigFree is signature free, thus it can block new and unknown buffer overflow attacks; SigFree is also immunized from most attack-side code obfuscation methods. Since SigFree is transparent to the servers being protected, it is good for economical Internet wide deployment with very low deployment and maintenance cost. We implemented and tested SigFree; our experimental study showed that SigFree could block all types of code-injection attack packets (above 250) tested in our experiments. Moreover, SigFree causes negligible throughput degradation to normal client requests.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages225-240
Number of pages16
StatePublished - 2006
Event15th USENIX Security Symposium - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Jul 31 2006Aug 4 2006

Conference

Conference15th USENIX Security Symposium
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period7/31/068/4/06

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

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

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