A systematic analysis of defenses against code reuse attacks

Abstract

In this thesis, we developed a systematic model of the code reuse attack space where facts about attacks and defenses were represented as propositional statements in boolean logic and the possibility of deploying malware was a satisfiability instance. We use the model to analyze the space in two ways: we analyze the defense configurations of a real-world system and we reason about hypothetical defense bypasses. We construct attacks based on the hypothetical defense bypasses. Next, we investigate the control flow graphs enforced by proposed control flow integrity (CFI) systems. We model the behavior of these systems using a graph search. We also develop several code reuse payloads that work within the control flow graph enforced by one proposed CFI defense. Our findings illustrate that the defenses we investigated are not effective in preventing real world attacks.