Stack layout transformation: Towards diversity for securing binary programs

B Rodes - 2012 34th International Conference on Software …, 2012 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
B Rodes
2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2012ieeexplore.ieee.org
Despite protracted efforts by both researchers and practitioners, security vulnerabilities
remain in modern software. Artificial diversity is an effective defense against many types of
attack, and one form, address-space randomization, has been widely applied. Present
artificial diversity implementations are either coarse-grained or require source code.
Because of the widespread use of software of unknown provenance, eg, libraries, where no
source code is provided or available, building diversity into the source code is not always …
Despite protracted efforts by both researchers and practitioners, security vulnerabilities remain in modern software. Artificial diversity is an effective defense against many types of attack, and one form, address-space randomization, has been widely applied. Present artificial diversity implementations are either coarse-grained or require source code. Because of the widespread use of software of unknown provenance, e.g., libraries, where no source code is provided or available, building diversity into the source code is not always possible. I investigate an approach to stack layout transformation that operates on x86 binary programs, which would allow users to obfuscate vulnerabilities and increase their confidence in the software's dependability. The proposed approach is speculative: the stack frame layout for a function is inferred from the binary and assessed by executing the transformed program. Upon assessment failure, the inferred layout is refined in hopes to better reflect the actual function layout.
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