Taxi : defeating code reuse attacks with tagged memory
Name
965795675-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
858.63 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
256b913faf50d1d2ee39788cac0af8c0
Author(s)
González, Julián Armando
Advisor(s)
Howard E. Shrobe.
Date Issued
2015
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
The rise of code reuse attacks has been devastating for users of languages like C and C++ that lack memory safety. We survey existing defenses to understand why none are generally applicable, focusing our attention on the Code Pointer Integrity (CPI) defense. We show that while CPI is hard to implement securely on modern architectures, it is based on the promising idea of storing metadata on memory. We also introduce Taxi (Tagged C), a set of hardware modifications that aim to prevent code reuse attacks by storing small amounts of memory metadata known as tags in hardware. Our reference implementation prevents several classes of code reuse attacks without losing compatibility with the C memory model and provides valuable insight into how tagged architectures can be used to enforce security properties on existing code.
Description
Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2015.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 105-111).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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