Static secure page allocation for light-weight dynamic information flow tracking

  • Authors:

  • Juan Carlos Martinez Santos;Yunsi Fei;Zhijie Jerry Shi

  • Affiliations:

  • Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA;Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA;University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2012 international conference on Compilers, architectures and synthesis for embedded systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Dynamic information flow tracking (DIFT) is an effective security countermeasure for both low-level memory corruptions and high-level semantic attacks. However, many software approaches suffer large performance degradation, and hardware approaches have high logic and storage overhead. We propose a flexible and light-weight hardware/software co-design approach to perform DIFT based on secure page allocation. Instead of associating every data with a taint tag, we aggregate data according to their taints, i.e., putting data with different attributes in separate memory pages. Our approach is a compiler-aided process with architecture support. The implementation and analysis show that the memory overhead is little, and our approach can protect critical information, including return address, indirect jump address, and system call IDs, from being overwritten by malicious users.