Multi-variant Program Execution: Using Multi-core Systems to Defuse Buffer-Overflow Vulnerabilities

While memory-safe and type-safe languages have been available for many years, the vast majority of software is still implemented in type-unsafe languages such as C/C++. Despite massive concerted efforts by software vendors such as Microsoft to eliminate buffer overflow vulnerabilities through automated and manual code review, they continue to be found and exploited. We present a novel approach that accepts the existence of overflow vulnerabilities and uses parallelism available through current and future multicore architectures to detect vulnerabilities by monitoring the parallel execution of several slightly varying instances of the same application. During regular execution each instance performs equivalent computations. When an attacker attempts to inject an attack vector through a buffer overflow vulnerability, however, each instance reacts differently due to the variances we introduced into each instance. We describe our prototype implementation of such a parallelism-based buffer...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CISIS
• Authors: Babak Salamat, Andreas Gal, Todd Jackson, Karthikeyan Manivannan, Gregor Wagner, Michael Franz
• Keywords: Buffer Overflow, Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities, CISIS 2008, Overflow Vulnerabilities, Software Engineering