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Identifier

000388639

Title

Architectural support for instruction set randomization

Alternative Title

Αρχιτεκτονική υποστήριξη για την τυχαιοποίηση του συνόλου των εντολών του επεξεργαστή

Author

Λούτσης, Λαέρτης Η.

Thesis advisor

Μαρκάτος, Ευάγγελος

Reviewer

Ιωαννίδης, Σωτήρης
Παπαδοπούλη, Μαρία

Abstract

Code injection attacks continue to pose a threat to today's computing sys¬tems, as they exploit software vulnerabilities to inject and execute arbitrary or malicious code. Instruction Set Randomization (ISR) is able to protect a system against remote machine code injection attacks by randomizing the instruction set of each process. This way, the attacker will inject invalid code that will fail to execute on the randomized processor and thus, the attack will fail as well. However, all the existing implementations of ISR are based on emulators and binary instrumentation tools that (i) incur a significant runtime performance overhead, (ii) limit the ease of deployment of ISR, (iii) cannot protect the underlying operating system kernel, and (iv) are vulnerable to evasion attempts trying to bypass ISR protection. To address these issues we propose ASIST: an architecture with hard-ware and operating system support for ISR. We present the design and implementation of ASIST by modifying a SPARC processor, mapping it onto an FPGA board and finally running our modified Linux kernel to support the new features. The operating system loads the randomization key of each running process into a newly defined register, and the modified processor decodes the process's instructions with this key before execution. Moreover, ASIST protects the system against attacks that exploit kernel vulnerabilities to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges, by using a separate randomization key for the operating system. We show that ASIST transparently protects all applications and the op¬erating system kernel from machine code injection attacks with less than 1.5% runtime overhead, while only requiring 0.7% additional hardware.

Language

English, Greek

Subject

Encryption

ISR

Κρυπτογράφηση

Issue date

2014-11-21

Collection

School/Department--School of Sciences and Engineering--Department of Computer Science--Post-graduate theses

Type of Work--Post-graduate theses

Views

503

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