Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2018

Abstract

Stack Smashing Protection (SSP) is a simple and highly efficient technique widely used in practice as the front line defense against stack buffer overflow attacks. Unfortunately, SSP is known to be vulnerable to the so-called byte-by-byte attack. Although several remedy schemes are proposed in the recent literature, their security is achieved at the price of practicality, because their complex logics ruin SSP's simplicity and high-efficiency. In this paper, we present an elegant solution named as Polymorphic SSP (P-SSP) that attains the same security without sacrificing SSP's strengths. We also propose three extensions of the basic scheme for better compatibility, stronger security, and local variable protection, respectively. We have implemented both a compiler plugin and a binary instrumentation tool for deploying P-SSP. Their respective runtime overheads are only 0.24% and 1.01%. We have also experimented with our extensions and compared their pros and cons with the basic scheme.

Keywords

Brute force attack, Canary, Stack buffer overflow

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks DSN 2018: Luxembourg City, 25-28 June: Proceedings

First Page

243

Last Page

254

ISBN

9781538655955

Identifier

10.1109/DSN.2018.00035

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

City or Country

Los Alamitos, CA

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN.2018.00035

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