Drinking from LETHE: New methods of exploiting and mitigating memory corruption vulnerabilities

Drinking from LETHE: New methods of exploiting and mitigating memory corruption vulnerabilities

Memory corruption vulnerabilities have plagued computer systems since we started programming software. Techniques for transforming memory corruption primitives into arbitrary code execution exploits have evolved significantly over the past two decades, from "smashing the stack for fun and profit" to the current apex of "just in time code reuse" while playing a cat and mouse game with similarly evolving defensive mitigations: from PaX/NX-bit to fine-grained ASLR and beyond. By contextualizing this battle between attack and defense, I will demonstrate new defense strategies based on augmenting fine-grained ASLR with memory disclosure mitigations to render existing exploitation techniques unreliable. Modifications to the Xen hypervisor exploiting hardware accelerated virtualization extensions on the modern Intel platform enable realizing these new defense strategies without imposing significant runtime CPU overhead.

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