Oreo: Protecting ASLR Against Microarchitectural
Attacks
Name
song-shixins-sm-eecs-2025-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
1.32 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1c94bdee3a93cf5d722b200840dbddf6
Author(s)
Song, Shixin
Advisor(s)
Yan, Mengjia
Date Issued
May 2025
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is one of the most prominently deployed mitigations against memory corruption attacks. ASLR randomly shuffles program virtual addresses to prevent attackers from knowing the location of program contents in memory. Microarchitectural side channels have been shown to defeat ASLR through various hardware mechanisms. We systematically analyze existing microarchitectural attacks and identify multiple leakage paths. Given the vast attack surface exposed by ASLR, it is challenging to effectively prevent leaking the ASLR secret against microarchitectural attacks. Motivated by this, we present Oreo, a software-hardware co-design mitigation that strengthens ASLR against these attacks. Oreo uses a new memory mapping interface to remove secret randomized bits in virtual addresses before translating them to their corresponding physical addresses. This extra step hides randomized virtual addresses from microarchitecture structures, preventing side channels from leaking ASLR secrets. Oreo is transparent to user programs and incurs low overhead. We prototyped and evaluated our design on Linux using the hardware simulator gem5.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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