Protecting function pointers in binary

Authors:
Chao Zhang;Tao Wei;Zhaofeng Chen;Lei Duan;Stephen McCamant;Laszlo Szekeres
Affiliations:
Peking University, Beijing, China;Peking University & UC Berkeley, Berkeley, USA;Peking University, Beijing, USA;Peking University, Beijing, China;University of Minnesota, Minnesota, USA;Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSAC symposium on Information, computer and communications security
Year:
2013

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Abstract

Function pointers have recently become an important attack vector for control-flow hijacking attacks. However, no protection mechanisms for function pointers have yet seen wide adoption. Methods proposed in the literature have high overheads, are not compatible with existing development process, or both. In this paper, we investigate several protection methods and propose a new method called FPGate (i.e., Function Pointer Gate). FPGate rewrites x86 binary executables and implements a novel method to overcome compatibility issues. All these protection methods are then evaluated and compared from the perspectives of performance and ease of deployment. Experiments show that FPGate achieves a good balance between performance, robustness and compatibility.