Taxi : defeating code reuse attacks with tagged memory

The rise of code reuse attacks has been devastating for users of languages like C and C++ that lack memory safety. We survey existing defenses to understand why none are generally applicable, focusing our attention on the Code Pointer Integrity (CPI) defense. We show that while CPI is hard to implement securely on modern architectures, it is based on the promising idea of storing metadata on memory. We also introduce Taxi (Tagged C), a set of hardware modifications that aim to prevent code reuse attacks by storing small amounts of memory metadata known as tags in hardware. Our reference implementation prevents several classes of code reuse attacks without losing compatibility with the C memory model and provides valuable insight into how tagged architectures can be used to enforce security properties on existing code.

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

• González, Julián Armando

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Howard E. 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/1721.1/105987

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/105987