Survey of Protections from Buffer-Overflow Attacks

Piromsopa, Krerk; Enbody, Richard

doi:10.4186/ej.2011.15.2.31

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 41 publications

(33 reference statements)

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“…Ref. [18] introduced another architectural approach called Secure Bit, to protect control data such as return address. If secure bit is set for a particular data, it will not be used as control data and mark as untrustworthy [19].…”

Section: Hardware-based Mitigation Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

An In-Depth Survey of Bypassing Buffer Overflow Mitigation Techniques

et al. 2022

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Buffer Overflow (BOF) has been a ubiquitous security vulnerability for more than three decades, potentially compromising any software application or system. This vulnerability occurs primarily when someone attempts to write more bytes of data (shellcode) than a buffer can handle. To date, this primitive attack has been used to attack many different software systems, resulting in numerous buffer overflows. The most common type of buffer overflow is the stack overflow vulnerability, through which an adversary can gain admin privileges remotely, which can then be used to execute shellcode. Numerous mitigation techniques have been developed and deployed to reduce the likelihood of BOF attacks, but attackers still manage to bypass these techniques. A variety of mitigation techniques have been proposed and implemented on the hardware, operating system, and compiler levels. These techniques include No-EXecute (NX) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). The NX bit prevents the execution of malicious code by making various portions of the address space of a process inoperable. The ASLR algorithm randomly assigns addresses to various parts of the logical address space of a process as it is loaded in memory for execution. Position Independent Executable (PIE) and ASLR provide more robust protection by randomly generating binary segments. Read-only relocation (RELRO) protects the Global Offset Table (GOT) from overwriting attacks. StackGuard protects the stack by placing the canary before the return address in order to prevent stack smashing attacks. Despite all the mitigation techniques in place, hackers continue to be successful in bypassing them, making buffer overflow a persistent vulnerability. The current work aims to describe the stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability and review in detail the mitigation techniques reported in the literature as well as how hackers attempt to bypass them.

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Section: Hardware-based Mitigation Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

An In-Depth Survey of Bypassing Buffer Overflow Mitigation Techniques

et al. 2022

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“…A taxonomy of buffer-overflow protection schemes was established by Piromsopa [28,31]. There are three broad categories: static analysis, dynamic solutions, and isolation.…”

Section: Related Work : Protections Against Buffer-overflow At-tacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boundary Bit: Architectural Bound Checking for Buffer-Overflow Protection

Chiamwongpaet

Piromsopa

2020

ECTI-CIT

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We propose Boundary Bit, a new architectural bound-checking approach that detects and prevents buffer-overflow attacks. Boundary Bit extends an architecture by associating a bit to each memory entry. Software can set a (boundary) bit to delimit an object. On each memory access, the hardware will dynamically validate the object's bound using the boundary bit. With minimal hints from the compiler, our architectural design eliminates most (if not all) types of buffer-overflow attacks. These include attacks on non-control data (variables and arguments) and array-indexing errors. We evaluate the performance of Boundary Bit using simulation, and the results show that the majority of performance overheads lies in bit scanning operations. To mitigate performance overheads, we introduce a hardware bitmap to act as a cache. The results from our simulation shows that the hardware bitmap can absorb most overhead from bit scanning, which in the best-case scenario translated to 30 times speed up compared to the version that does not utilize bitmap cache.

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“…Figure 1 Buffer-Overflow Protections [9] From the above figure, these solutions are classified into 3 categories [9] as follows.…”

Section: Chapter III Literature Reviewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Buffer-Overflow Protection Using Boundary Bit

Chiamwongpaet

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Boundary Bit is a new architectural bound-checking approach for preventing against buffer-overﬂow attacks. It adds an associated bit to each memory entry to support bound checking. To make a boundary, software can simply set a (boundary) bit. On memory writing, hardware will dynamically validate limit using the boundary bit. With a minimal hint from software (compiler), our architectural design eliminates most (if not all) types of buffer-overﬂow attacks, including attacks on non-control data (variables and arguments) and array-indexing errors. Software can easily support Boundary Bit with few (minor) modiﬁcation. Boundary Bit is secure and efﬁcient with few (none) performance degradation. Our implementation shows that hardware can absorbed most bit-scanning overhead by using bitmap. An 1-level bitmap with proper size is better than a 2-level bitmap.

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Survey of Protections from Buffer-Overflow Attacks

Cited by 13 publications

References 41 publications

An In-Depth Survey of Bypassing Buffer Overflow Mitigation Techniques

An In-Depth Survey of Bypassing Buffer Overflow Mitigation Techniques

Boundary Bit: Architectural Bound Checking for Buffer-Overflow Protection

Buffer-Overflow Protection Using Boundary Bit

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