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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 (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:19PM

  by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:19PM (#567402) Journal

  As in "process killed hard because it tried to do something it shouldn't be allowed to do, and hardware gave it zero choice but to immediately terminate." Not just "oh, just set the service to auto-restart silently in the background if it dies and make sure it runs as admin".

  You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. When a process is "silently restarted," it is killed hard. And some other process notices that the process is gone, and starts a new process for the same program. And there's zero the hardware can do against this, except possibly disallow the OS from starting a new process. But hardware that does that would be 100% useless, as you couldn't do anything with it.

  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

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