NOZZLE: a defense against heap-spraying code injection attacks

• Authors: Paruj Ratanaworabhan;Benjamin Livshits;Benjamin Zorn
• Venue: SSYM'09 Proceedings of the 18th conference on USENIX security symposium
• Year: 2009

Heap spraying is a security attack that increases the exploitability of memory corruption errors in type-unsafe applications. In a heap-spraying attack, an attacker coerces an application to allocate many objects containing malicious code in the heap, increasing the success rate of an exploit that jumps to a location within the heap. Because heap layout randomization necessitates new forms of attack, spraying has been used in many recent security exploits. Spraying is especially effective in web browsers, where the attacker can easily allocate the malicious objects using JavaScript embedded in a web page. In this paper, we describe NOZZLE, a runtime heap-spraying detector. NOZZLE examines individual objects in the heap, interpreting them as code and performing a static analysis on that code to detect malicious intent. To reduce false positives, we aggregate measurements across all heap objects and define a global heap health metric. We measure the effectiveness of NOZZLE by demonstrating that it successfully detects 12 published and 2,000 synthetically generated heap-spraying exploits. We also show that even with a detection threshold set six times lower than is required to detect published malicious attacks, NOZZLE reports no false positives when run over 150 popular Internet sites. Using sampling and concurrent scanning to reduce overhead, we show that the performance overhead of NOZZLE is less than 7% on average. While NOZZLE currently targets heap-based spraying attacks, its techniques can be applied to any attack that attempts to fill the address space with malicious code objects (e.g., stack spraying [42]).