Software diversity protects against a modern-day exploits such as code-reuse attacks. When an attacker designs a code-reuse attack on an example executable, it relies on replicating the target environment. With software diversity, the attacker cannot reliably replicate their target. This is a security benefit which can be applied to massive-scale software distribution. When applied to large-sca...

The reuse of algorithms and hardware developed for searches of large molecular biologic databases is examined for detecting new variants of computer attacks before they can inflict damage. New attacks are viewed as evolutions of previous attacks, with associated mutations, insertions, and deletions from either machine code or text script sequences. Similarity searches are done between previous ...

Despite numerous attempts to mitigate code-reuse attacks, Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is still at the core of exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities. Most notably, in JIT-ROP, an attacker dynamically searches for suitable gadgets in executable code pages, even if they have been randomized. JIT-ROP seemingly requires that (i) code is readable (to find gadgets at run time) and (ii) ex...

Fine-grained Address Space Randomization has been considered as an effective protection against code reuse attacks such as ROP/JOP. However, it only employs a one-time randomization, and such a limitation has been exploited by recent just-in-time ROP and side channel ROP, which collect gadgets on-the-fly and dynamically compile them for malicious purposes. To defeat these advanced code reuse at...

It is a well-known issue that attack primitives which exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities can abuse the ability of processes to automatically restart upon termination. For example, network services like FTP and HTTP servers are typically restarted in case a crash happens and this can be used to defeat Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). Furthermore, recently several techniques evol...

JIT spraying is a new code-reuse technique to attack virtual machines based on JIT (Just-in-time) compilation. It has proven to be capable of circumventing the defenses such as data execution prevention (DEP) and address space layout randomization(ASLR), which are effective for preventing the traditional code injection attacks. In this paper, we describe JITDefender, an enhancement of standard ...

This paper introduces ∆Breakpad. It extends the Breakpad crash reporting system to handle software diversity effectively and efficiently by replicating and patching the debug information of diversified software versions. Simple adaptations to existing open source compiler tools are presented that on the one hand introduce significant amounts of diversification in the code and stack layout of AR...

Return-into-libc (RILC) is one of the most common forms of code-reuse attacks. In this attack, an intruder uses a buffer overflow or other exploit to redirect control flow through existing (libc) functions within the legitimate program. While dangerous, it is generally considered limited in its expressive power since it only allows the attacker to execute straight-line code. In other words, RIL...