SegmentShield: Exploiting Segmentation Hardware for Protecting against Buffer Overflow Attacks

This paper presents a strong and efficient scheme for protecting against buffer overflow attacks. The basic approach of this scheme is pointer copying: copies of code pointers are stored in a safe memory area to detect and prevent the manipulation of code pointers. In order to protect the copied cod...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2006 25th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS'06) pp. 277 - 288
Main Author: Shinagawa, T.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.10.2006
Subjects:
Agriculture
Buffer overflow
Cryptography
Hardware
Information science
Kernel
Linux
Protection
Runtime
Security
ISBN:9780769526775, 0769526772
ISSN:1060-9857
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper presents a strong and efficient scheme for protecting against buffer overflow attacks. The basic approach of this scheme is pointer copying: copies of code pointers are stored in a safe memory area to detect and prevent the manipulation of code pointers. In order to protect the copied code pointers from data-pointer modification attacks, this scheme exploits the segmentation hardware of IA-32 (Intel x86) processors. This scheme provides as strong protection as write-protecting the memory area via system calls. On the other hand, this scheme involves a modest overhead because copying a code pointer requires only a few user-level instructions and there is no penalty of entering the kernel. The experimental results show that the performance overhead in OpenSSL ranges from 0.9% to 4.3%
ISBN:9780769526775
0769526772
ISSN:1060-9857
DOI:10.1109/SRDS.2006.43