The MINESTRONE Architecture Combining Static and Dynamic Analysis Techniques for Software Security

Keromytis, Angelos D.; Stolfo, Salvatore J.; Yang, Junfeng; Stavrou, Angelos; Ghosh, Anup K.; Engler, Dawson; Daciér, Marc; Elder, Matthew; Kienzle, Darrell

doi:10.1109/syssec.2011.33

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(17 reference statements)

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“…It has been shown that even one such vulnerability can be used repeatedly by an attacker to bypass even fine-grained forms of randomization [52]. Other randomization-based techniques include Genesis [60], Minestrone [29], or RISE [8] implement instruction set randomization using an emulation, instrumentation, or binary translation layer such as Valgrind [38], Strata [46], or Intel PIN [34] which in itself incurs a large overhead, sometimes as high as multiple times slowdown to the applications.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Missing the Point(er): On the Effectiveness of Code Pointer Integrity

Evans

Fingeret

González

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

117

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Abstract-Memory corruption attacks continue to be a major vector of attack for compromising modern systems. Numerous defenses have been proposed against memory corruption attacks, but they all have their limitations and weaknesses. Stronger defenses such as complete memory safety for legacy languages (C/C++) incur a large overhead, while weaker ones such as practical control flow integrity have been shown to be ineffective. A recent technique called code pointer integrity (CPI) promises to balance security and performance by focusing memory safety on code pointers thus preventing most control-hijacking attacks while maintaining low overhead. CPI protects access to code pointers by storing them in a safe region that is protected by instruction level isolation. On x86-32, this isolation is enforced by hardware; on x86-64 and ARM, isolation is enforced by information hiding. We show that, for architectures that do not support segmentation in which CPI relies on information hiding, CPI's safe region can be leaked and then maliciously modified by using data pointer overwrites. We implement a proofof-concept exploit against Nginx and successfully bypass CPI implementations that rely on information hiding in 6 seconds with 13 observed crashes. We also present an attack that generates no crashes and is able to bypass CPI in 98 hours. Our attack demonstrates the importance of adequately protecting secrets in security mechanisms and the dangers of relying on difficulty of guessing without guaranteeing the absence of memory leaks.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Missing the Point(er): On the Effectiveness of Code Pointer Integrity

Evans

Fingeret

González

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

117

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Huang et al 2004]. Similar approaches have been proposed by Zhang et al [Zhang et al 2011], Balzarotti et al [Balzarotti et al 2008] and Keromytis et al [Keromytis et al 2011]. None of these previous works tracks address leaks.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 90%

Dynamic Detection of Address Leaks

Quadros¹,

Souza²,

Pereira³

2012

Anais Do XII Simpósio Brasileiro De Segurança Da Informação E De Sistemas Computacionais (SBSeg 2012)

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An address leak is a software vulnerability that allows an adversary to discover where a program is loaded in memory. Although seemingly harmless, this information gives the adversary the means to circumvent two widespread protection mechanisms: Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP). In this paper we show, via an example, how to explore an address leak to take control of a remote server running on an operating system protected by ASLR and DEP. We then present a code instrumentation framework that hinders address disclosure at runtime. Finally, we use a static analysis to prove that parts of the program do not need to be instrumented; hence, reducing the instrumentation overhead. We claim in this paper that the combination of the static and dynamic analyses provide us with a reliable and practical way to secure software against address leaks.

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“…The project concerns securely executing potentially untrusted programs; artificial diversity is a common technique used to achieve this goal. Example projects in this program include: MINESTRONE [36,59], PEASOUP [10], and VIBRANCE [7,11,53].…”

Section: Stone Soupmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for software diversity

Lundquist

Mohan

Hamlen

2016

Proceedings of the 2016 New Security Paradigms Workshop

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A means of attaining richer, more comprehensive forms of software diversity on a mass scale is proposed through leveraging and repurposing a closely related, yet heretofore untapped, line of computer science research-automatic program synthesis. It is argued that the search-based methodologies presently used for obtaining implementations from specifications can be broadened relatively easily to a search for many candidate solutions, potentially diversifying the software monoculture. Small-scale experiments using the Rosette synthesis tool o↵er preliminary support for this proposed approach. But the possible rewards are not without danger: It is argued that the same approach can power a dangerous new level of sophistication for malware mutation and reactively adaptive software threats. CCS Concepts •Security and privacy ! Software security engineering; •Software and its engineering ! Source code generation; Automatic programming; Search-based software engineering;

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The MINESTRONE Architecture Combining Static and Dynamic Analysis Techniques for Software Security

Cited by 4 publications

References 25 publications

Missing the Point(er): On the Effectiveness of Code Pointer Integrity

Missing the Point(er): On the Effectiveness of Code Pointer Integrity

Dynamic Detection of Address Leaks

Searching for software diversity

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