A Taxonomy of Buffer Overflow Characteristics

Abstract

Abstract-Significant work on vulnerabilities focuses on buffer overflows, in which data exceeding the bounds of an array is loaded into the array. The loading continues past the array boundary, causing variables and state information located adjacent to the array to change. As the process is not programmed to check for these additional changes, the process acts incorrectly. The incorrect action often places the system in a nonsecure state. This work develops a taxonomy of buffer overflow vulnerabilities based upon characteristics, or preconditions that must hold for an exploitable buffer overflow to exist. We analyze several software and hardware countermeasures to validate the approach. We then discuss alternate approaches to ameliorating this vulnerability.

Protection against Buffer Overflow Attacks through Runtime Memory Layout Randomization

“…FFRR technique can be used as a defense against all 18 attack techniques listed in [3]. In future, we will implement our technique in GCC Compiler and will do benchmarking for standard Linux programs.…”

“…2) Should be holistic in nature and should be able to defend against all the 18 predictions indicated in [3]. 3) In accordance with kerchoff's first principle of cryptography the proposed mechanism should be key centric rather than algorithm centric.…”

Defending Internet of Things against Exploits

“…Para proteger a IoT são necessárias muitas camadas de segurança incluindo uma que proteja a IoT de exploração de falhas de código via manipulação das entradas. Entre exemplos de ataques desse tipo em sistemas tradicionais podemos citar o Estouro de Arranjo (BoF -Buffer Overflow) [11], Estouro de Inteiro (IoF -Integer Overflow) [12] e a Injeção de SQL (SQL Injection) [3]. Acreditamos que ataques desse tipo serão frequentes em sistemas da IoT também.…”

HeapDefender: A Mechanism of Defending Embedded Systems against Heap Overflow via Hardware

“…A buffer overflow occurs when a program writes data to a buffer then overruns the buffer's boundary and overwrites adjacent memory [4] [5]. According to the overflowed buffer's memory region, there are two types of buffer overflows: stack overflows and heap overflows.…”

“…Static analysis tools usually have high false alarm rates; dynamic buffer overflow detectors can provide precise detection and generally there can be no false alarms. However few dynamic heap buffer overflow detectors are widely deployed due to one or more of the following reasons: (1) many countermeasures result in high performance overhead [14] [25]; (4) some require special platforms that are rarely available [18] [20].…”