Defeating code reuse attacks with minimal tagged architecture

Abstract

In this thesis, we argue that software-based defenses to code reuse attacks are fundamentally flawed. With code pointer integrity as a case study, we show that a secure and efficient software-based defense to code reuse attacks is impossible and thus motivate the case for hardware approaches. We then propose our tagged architecture system Taxi (Tagged C) as a practical defense against code reuse attacks which minimally modifies existing hardware components. We also propose strong defense policies which aim to guarantee security while minimizing tag memory usage. Our Taxi prototype, a modified RISC-V ISA simulator, demonstrates that we can defeat code reuse attacks with high compatibility and low memory overhead.