Shreds: Fine-Grained Execution Units with Private Memory

Once attackers have injected code into a victim program's address space, or found a memory disclosure vulnerability, all sensitive data and code inside that address space are subject to thefts or manipulation. Unfortunately, this broad type of attack is hard to prevent, even if software develop...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy pp. 56 - 71
Main Authors: Yaohui Chen, Reymondjohnson, Sebassujeen, Zhichuang Sun, Long Lu
Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.05.2016
Subjects:
Computer programs
Developers
fine-grained private memory
Instruction sets
Libraries
Malware
memory domain
Memory management
memory protection
Privacy
Run time (computers)
Runtime
Security
shred
Software
Source code
ISSN:2375-1207
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Once attackers have injected code into a victim program's address space, or found a memory disclosure vulnerability, all sensitive data and code inside that address space are subject to thefts or manipulation. Unfortunately, this broad type of attack is hard to prevent, even if software developers wish to cooperate, mostly because the conventional memory protection only works at process level and previously proposed in-process memory isolation methods are not practical for wide adoption. We propose shreds, a set of OS-backed programming primitives that addresses developers' currently unmet needs for fine-grained, convenient, and efficient protection of sensitive memory content against in-process adversaries. A shred can be viewed as a flexibly defined segment of a thread execution (hence the name). Each shred is associated with a protected memory pool, which is accessible only to code running in the shred. Unlike previous works, shreds offer in-process private memory without relying on separate page tables, nested paging, or even modified hardware. Plus, shreds provide the essential data flow and control flow guarantees for running sensitive code. We have built the compiler toolchain and the OS module that together enable shreds on Linux. We demonstrated the usage of shreds and evaluated their performance using 5 non-trivial open source software, including OpenSSH and Lighttpd. The results show that shreds are fairly easy to use and incur low runtime overhead (4.67%).
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Conference-1
ObjectType-Feature-3
content type line 23
SourceType-Conference Papers & Proceedings-2
ISSN:2375-1207
DOI:10.1109/SP.2016.12