Control-Flow Integrity
Abstract
Memory corruption errors in C/C++ programs remain the most common source of security vulnerabilities in today’s systems. Control-flow hijacking attacks exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities to divert program execution away from the intended control flow. Researchers have spent more than a decade studying and refining defenses based on Control-Flow Integrity (CFI); this technique is now integrated into several production compilers. However, so far, no study has systematically compared the various proposed CFI mechanisms nor is there any protocol on how to compare such mechanisms. We compare a broad range of CFI mechanisms using a unified nomenclature based on (i) a qualitative discussion of the conceptual security guarantees, (ii) a quantitative security evaluation, and (iii) an empirical evaluation of their performance in the same test environment. For each mechanism, we evaluate (i) protected types of control-flow transfers and (ii) precision of the protection for forward and backward edges. For open-source, compiler-based implementations, we also evaluate (iii) generated equivalence classes and target sets and (iv) runtime performance.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Apr 04, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3054924
Entities
People
- Joseph Nash
- Mathias Payer
- Michael Franz
- Nathan Burow
- Per Larsen
- Scott A. Carr
- Stefan Brunthaler
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- National Science Foundation
- Purdue University
- University of California, Irvine
- University of Paderborn