System V application binary interface (3rd ed.)
System V application binary interface (3rd ed.)
Efficient detection of all pointer and array access errors
PLDI '94 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1994 conference on Programming language design and implementation
C, a reference manual (4th ed.)
C, a reference manual (4th ed.)
ITS4: A static vulnerability scanner for C and C++ code
ACSAC '00 Proceedings of the 16th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
RAD: A Compile-Time Solution to Buffer Overflow Attacks
ICDCS '01 Proceedings of the The 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
Statically detecting likely buffer overflow vulnerabilities
SSYM'01 Proceedings of the 10th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 10
StackGuard: automatic adaptive detection and prevention of buffer-overflow attacks
SSYM'98 Proceedings of the 7th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 7
Transparent run-time defense against stack smashing attacks
ATEC '00 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Repairing return address stack for buffer overflow protection
Proceedings of the 1st conference on Computing frontiers
Leveraging speculative architectures for runtime program validation
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)
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Program counter is the only mechanism for processor to access instruction to execute. Protecting program counter is the fundamental defense for securing computer system. This paper presents a scheme of protecting program counter by encoding function pointers. In the scheme, every function address is encoded by linker. Compiler inserts instructions for decoding function addresses before call instruction. Encoding code pointers, function addresses as well as return addresses in stack frame, provides substantial coverage of protecting program counter. Several suggestions are also made to detect compromised code pointers at run-time without memory space for sensor mechanism. A demo Linux system has been under construction with the proposed scheme. Experimental data shows performance slowdown less than 10% when all return addresses and function addresses are encoded. With a Pentium III processor of 866MHz, the overhead for each function call is on the order of nanoseconds. We plan to migrate parts of our code pointer encoding scheme from linker to dynamic linker, which should improve security and performance.