Defeating code reuse attacks with minimal tagged architecture

In this thesis, we argue that software-based defenses to code reuse attacks are fundamentally flawed. With code pointer integrity as a case study, we show that a secure and efficient software-based defense to code reuse attacks is impossible and thus motivate the case for hardware approaches. We then propose our tagged architecture system Taxi (Tagged C) as a practical defense against code reuse attacks which minimally modifies existing hardware components. We also propose strong defense policies which aim to guarantee security while minimizing tag memory usage. Our Taxi prototype, a modified RISC-V ISA simulator, demonstrates that we can defeat code reuse attacks with high compatibility and low memory overhead.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Fingeret, Samuel (Samuel P.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Howard Shrobe.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/105986

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/105986