FFRR: a software diversity technique for defending against buffer overflow attacks Online publication date: Tue, 17-May-2022
by N. Raghu Kisore; K. Shiva Kumar
International Journal of Information and Computer Security (IJICS), Vol. 18, No. 1/2, 2022
Abstract: To date, several software diversity techniques have been proposed as defence to buffer overflow attacks. The existing diversity techniques sometimes rely on hardware support or modifications to operating system which makes them difficult to deploy. Further, the diversity is determined at the time of either compilation, link or load time, making them vulnerable to brute force attacks and attacks based on information leakage. In this work we study and implement function frame runtime randomisation (FFRR) technique (Shiva Kumar and Neelisetti, 2014) that generates variants of program binary from a single variant of the source program at runtime. We implemented FFRR as a compile time flag in GCC (C compiler) that can be activated at compile time and hence can be easily applied to legacy programs. FFRR incurs an average execution time overhead (SPEC CPU 2006) of 16%, while ASLR incurs an overhead of 21%.
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