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RETGUARD: A Return-Oriented Programming Defense From OpenBSD

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:03AM   
from the going-back dept.

canopic jug writes:

Return-oriented programming (ROP) is now a common technique for compromising systems via a stack-smashing vulnerability. Although restrictions on executing code on the stack have mostly put an end to many simple stack-smashing attacks, that does not mean that they are no longer a threat. There are various schemes in use for defeating ROP attacks. A new mechanism called "RETGUARD" is being implemented in OpenBSD and is notable for its relative simplicity. It makes use of a simple return-address transformation to disrupt ROP chains to hinder their execution and takes the form of a patch to the LLVM compiler adding a new flag.

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Original Submission

• Re:If you want to prevent Re:If you want to prevent (Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:50AM (1 child)

  by kazzie (5309) on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:50AM (#567126)

  This is not about stack overflows hitting the return address. Its about preventing jumping to the middle of functions and having them return normally.

  Not quite. From TFA:

  There is, of course, a significant limitation here: a ROP chain made up of exclusively polymorphic gadgets [created by jumping into the middle of a multi-byte instruction] will still work, since those gadgets were not (intentionally) created by the compiler and do not contain the return-address-mangling code.

  Parent

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• Re:If you want to prevent (Score: 2) by Virindi on Wednesday September 13 2017, @08:46AM

  by Virindi (3484) on Wednesday September 13 2017, @08:46AM (#567135)

  Even more useful, though, for architectures such as ARM which require fixed length aligned instructions.

  Parent