A systematic analysis of defenses against code reuse attacks

In this thesis, we developed a systematic model of the code reuse attack space where facts about attacks and defenses were represented as propositional statements in boolean logic and the possibility of deploying malware was a satisfiability instance. We use the model to analyze the space in two ways: we analyze the defense configurations of a real-world system and we reason about hypothetical defense bypasses. We construct attacks based on the hypothetical defense bypasses. Next, we investigate the control flow graphs enforced by proposed control flow integrity (CFI) systems. We model the behavior of these systems using a graph search. We also develop several code reuse payloads that work within the control flow graph enforced by one proposed CFI defense. Our findings illustrate that the defenses we investigated are not effective in preventing real world attacks.

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

2013

Author dc:creator

• Casteel, Kelly (Kelly C.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hamed Okhravi and Nickolai Zeldovich.

• 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/1721.1/85409

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/85409