Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is a software exploit for system compromise. By chaining short instruction sequences from existing code pieces, ROP can bypass static code-integrity checking approaches and non-executable page protections. Existing defenses either require access to source code or binary, a customized compiler or hardware modifications, or suffer from high performance and storage overhead. In this work, we propose SIGDROP, a low-cost approach for ROP detection which uses low-level properties inherent to ROP attacks. Specifically, we observe special patterns of certain hardware events when a ROP attack occurs during program execution. Such hardware event-based patterns form signatures to flag ROP attacks at runtime. SIGDROP leverages Hardware Performance Counters, which are already present in commodity processors, to efficiently capture and extract the signatures. Our evaluation demonstrates that SIGDROP can effectively detect ROP attacks with acceptable performance overhead and negligible storage overhead.
KBouncer @cite_8 and ROPecker @cite_30 use the last branch record (LBR) hardware registers to trace the target addresses of indirect branches and compare them against the golden control flow path of the software. Since LBR registers are only available on Intel platforms, KBouncer and ROPecker are not portable to AMD and ARM platforms. On the other hand, SIGDROP can be adapted to commodity platforms with readily available HPCs.
@cite_30 @cite_8
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Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is a sophisticated exploitation technique that is able to drive target applications to perform arbitrary unintended operations by constructing a gadget chain reusing existing small code sequences (gadgets). Existing defense mechanisms either only handle specific types of gadgets, require access to source code and or a customized compiler, break the integrity of application binary, or suffer from high performance overhead. In this paper, we present a novel system, ROPecker, to efficiently and effectively defend against ROP attacks without relying on any other side information (e.g., source code and compiler support) or binary rewriting. ROPecker detects an ROP attack at run-time by checking the presence of a sufficiently long chain of gadgets in past and future execution flow, with the assistance of the taken branches recorded in the Last Branch Record (LBR) registers and an efficient technique combining offline analysis with run-time emulation. We also design a sliding window mechanism to invoke the detection logic in proper timings, which achieves both high detection accuracy and efficiency. We build an ROPecker prototype on x86-based Linux computers and evaluate its security effectiveness, space cost and performance overhead. In our experiment, ROPecker can detect all ROP attacks from real-world examples and generated by the generalpurpose ROP compiler Q. It has small footprints on memory and disk storage, and only incurs acceptable performance overhead on CPU computation, disk I O and network I O. Return-oriented programming (ROP) has become the primary exploitation technique for system compromise in the presence of non-executable page protections. ROP exploits are facilitated mainly by the lack of complete address space randomization coverage or the presence of memory disclosure vulnerabilities, necessitating additional ROP-specific mitigations. In this paper we present a practical runtime ROP exploit prevention technique for the protection of third-party applications. Our approach is based on the detection of abnormal control transfers that take place during ROP code execution. This is achieved using hardware features of commodity processors, which incur negligible runtime overhead and allow for completely transparent operation without requiring any modifications to the protected applications. Our implementation for Windows 7, named kBouncer, can be selectively enabled for installed programs in the same fashion as user-friendly mitigation toolkits like Microsoft's EMET. The results of our evaluation demonstrate that kBouncer has low runtime overhead of up to 4 , when stressed with specially crafted workloads that continuously trigger its core detection component, while it has negligible overhead for actual user applications. In our experiments with in-the-wild ROP exploits, kBouncer successfully protected all tested applications, including Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader.