Return Address Randomization Scheme for Annuling Data-Injection Buffer Overflow Attacks

Buffer overflow(BOF) has been the most common form of vulnerability in software systems today, and many methods exist to defend software systems against BOF attacks. Among them, the instruction set randomization scheme, which makes attacker not to know the specific instruction set of the target machine, is the most promising defense scheme because it defends all typical code-injection BOF attacks. However, this defense scheme can not cover data-injection BOF attacks like return-into-libc attacks. In order to defend against the data-injection BOF attacks as well as the code-injection BOF attacks, we propose an enhanced defense scheme randomizing not only the instruction sets but also the return addresses. Implementation results show that the proposed scheme can defend software systems against data-injection BOF attacks as well as code-injection BOF attacks without significant extra overheads.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CISC
• Authors: Deok Jin Kim, Tae Hyung Kim, Jong Kim, Sung Je Hong
• Keywords: BOF Attacks, CISC 2006, Code-injection Bof Attacks, Cryptology, Data-injection Bof Attacks