TY - GEN
T1 - Identifying arbitrary memory access vulnerabilities in privilege-separated software
AU - Hu, Hong
AU - Chua, Zheng Leong
AU - Liang, Zhenkai
AU - Saxena, Prateek
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Xinshu Dong and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. This research is supported in part by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its National Cybersecurity R&D Program (Award No. NRF2014NCR-NCR001-21) and administered by the National Cybersecurity R&D Directorate, and by a research grant from Symantec.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - Privilege separation is a widely used technique to secure complex software systems. With privilege separation, software components are divided into several partitions and these partitions can only communicate through limited interfaces. However, the interfaces still provide a channel for one partition to influence code in other partitions. As a result, certain memory access patterns can be leveraged by attackers to perform arbitrary memory access. We refer to this type of memory access errors by the acronym DUI (Dereference Under the Influence). In this paper, we present a systematic method to detect vulnerabilities leading to DUI through binary analysis, and to estimate the capability attackers can obtain through DUI exploits. The evaluation shows that our approach can accurately identify vulnerable code that leads to arbitrary memory access in real-world software components and programs, when they are transformed to privilege-separated designs.
AB - Privilege separation is a widely used technique to secure complex software systems. With privilege separation, software components are divided into several partitions and these partitions can only communicate through limited interfaces. However, the interfaces still provide a channel for one partition to influence code in other partitions. As a result, certain memory access patterns can be leveraged by attackers to perform arbitrary memory access. We refer to this type of memory access errors by the acronym DUI (Dereference Under the Influence). In this paper, we present a systematic method to detect vulnerabilities leading to DUI through binary analysis, and to estimate the capability attackers can obtain through DUI exploits. The evaluation shows that our approach can accurately identify vulnerable code that leads to arbitrary memory access in real-world software components and programs, when they are transformed to privilege-separated designs.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-24177-7_16
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-24177-7_16
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84951819578
SN - 9783319241760
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 312
EP - 331
BT - Computer Security – ESORICS 2015 - 20th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Proceedings
A2 - Pernul, Günther
A2 - Ryan, Peter Y.A.
A2 - Weippl, Edgar
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 20th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2015
Y2 - 21 September 2015 through 25 September 2015
ER -