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Virginia Tech

HyperSpace: Data-Value Integrity for Securing Software

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Most modern software attacks are rooted in memory corruption vulnerabilities. They redirect security-sensitive data values (e.g., return address, function pointer, and heap metadata) to an unintended value. Current state-of-the-art policies, such as Data-Flow Integrity (DFI) and Control-Flow Integrity (CFI), are effective but often struggle to balance precision, generality, and runtime overhead. In this thesis, we propose Data-Value Integrity (DVI), a new defense policy that enforces the integrity of "data value" for security-sensitive control and non-control data. DVI breaks an essential step of memory corruption based attacks by asserting the compromised security-sensitive data value. To show the efficacy of DVI, we present HyperSpace, a prototype that enforces DVI to provide four representative security mechanisms. These include Code Pointer Separation (DVI-CPS) and Code Pointer Integrity (DVI-CPI) based on HyperSpace. We evaluate HyperSpace with SPEC CPU2006 and real-world servers. We also test HyperSpace against memory corruption based attacks, including three real-world exploits and six attacks that bypass existing defenses. Our evaluation shows that HyperSpace successfully detects all attacks and introduces low runtime performance and memory overhead: 1.02% and 6.35% performance overhead for DVI-CPS and DVI-CPI, respectively, and overall approximately 15% memory overhead.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2020

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Yom, Jinwoo
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Min, Chang Woo
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Tront, Joseph G.
  • Marchany, Randolph Carlos
  • Raymond, David Richard

Subjects

dc:subject × 3

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:25731
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/106593

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Yom, Jinwoo. HyperSpace: Data-Value Integrity for Securing Software. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/106593