Minos: Control data attack prevention orthogonal to memory model

JR Crandall, FT Chong - 37th International Symposium on …, 2004 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
37th International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-37'04), 2004ieeexplore.ieee.org
We introduce Minos, a microarchitecture that implements Biba's low-water-mark integrity
policy on individual words of data. Minos stops attacks that corrupt control data to hijack
program control flow but is orthogonal to the memory model. Control data is any data which
is loaded into the program counter on control flow transfer, or any data used to calculate
such data. The key is that Minos tracks the integrity of all data, but protects control flow by
checking this integrity when a program uses the data for control transfer. Existing policies, in …
We introduce Minos, a microarchitecture that implements Biba's low-water-mark integrity policy on individual words of data. Minos stops attacks that corrupt control data to hijack program control flow but is orthogonal to the memory model. Control data is any data which is loaded into the program counter on control flow transfer, or any data used to calculate such data. The key is that Minos tracks the integrity of all data, but protects control flow by checking this integrity when a program uses the data for control transfer. Existing policies, in contrast, need to differentiate between control and non-control data a priori, a task made impossible by coercions between pointers and other data types such as integers in the C language. Our implementation of Minos for Red Hat Linux 6.2 on a Pentium-based emulator is a stable, usable Linux system on the network on which we are currently running a web server. Our emulated Minos systems running Linux and Windows have stopped several actual attacks. We present a microarchitectural implementation of Minos that achieves negligible impact on cycle time with a small investment in die area, and minor changes to the Linux kernel to handle the tag bits and perform virtual memory swapping.
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