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Binary Code Continent: Finer-Grained Control Flow Integrity for Stripped Binaries

Authors:

Abhishek Vasisht Bhaskar,

Dengguo FengAuthors Info & Claims

ACSAC '15: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 2015

Pages 331 - 340

https://doi.org/10.1145/2818000.2818017

Published: 07 December 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Control Flow Integrity (CFI) is an effective technique to mitigate threats such as code-injection and code-reuse attacks in programs by protecting indirect transfers. For stripped binaries, a CFI policy has to be made conservatively due to the lack of source code level semantics. Existing binary-only CFI solutions such as BinCFI and CCFIR demonstrate the ability to protect stripped binaries, but the policies they apply are too permissive, allowing sophisticated code-reuse attacks. In this paper, we propose a new binary-only CFI protection scheme called BinCC, which applies static binary rewriting to provide finer-grained protection for x86 stripped ELF binaries. Through code duplication and static analysis, we divide the binary code into several mutually exclusive code continents. We further classify each indirect transfer within a code continent as either an Intra-Continent transfer or an Inter-Continent transfer, and apply separate, strict CFI polices to constrain these transfers. To evaluate BinCC, we introduce new metrics to estimate the average amount of legitimate targets of each kind of indirect transfer as well as the difficulty to leverage call preceded gadgets to generate ROP exploits. Compared to the state of the art binary-only CFI, BinCFI, the experimental results show that BinCC significantly reduces the legitimate transfer targets by 81.34% and increases the difficulty for adversaries to bypass CFI restriction to launch sophisticated ROP attacks. Also, BinCC achieves a reasonable performance, around 14% of the space overhead decrease and only 4% runtime overhead increase as compared to BinCFI.

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Cited By

Vaidya RKulkarni P(2024)Effectiveness of Binary-Level CFI TechniquesFoundations and Practice of Security10.1007/978-3-031-57537-2_6(87-103)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57537-2_6
Kim HKim SLee JJee KCha SCalandrino JTroncoso C(2023)Reassembly is hardProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620320(1469-1486)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3620237.3620320
Gaidis AMoreira JSun KMilburn AAtlidakis VKemerlis V(2023)FineIBT: Fine-grain Control-flow Enforcement with Indirect Branch TrackingProceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses10.1145/3607199.3607219(527-546)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607199.3607219
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Binary Code Continent: Finer-Grained Control Flow Integrity for Stripped Binaries
1. Security and privacy
  1. Systems security
    1. Operating systems security

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cover image ACM Other conferences

ACSAC '15: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 2015

489 pages

ISBN:9781450336826

DOI:10.1145/2818000

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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ACSA: Applied Computing Security Assoc

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 07 December 2015

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Control Flow Integrity

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ACSAC 2015

ACSAC 2015: 2015 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 7 - 11, 2015

CA, Los Angeles, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 104 of 497 submissions, 21%

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Citations

Cited By

Vaidya RKulkarni P(2024)Effectiveness of Binary-Level CFI TechniquesFoundations and Practice of Security10.1007/978-3-031-57537-2_6(87-103)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57537-2_6
Kim HKim SLee JJee KCha SCalandrino JTroncoso C(2023)Reassembly is hardProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620320(1469-1486)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3620237.3620320
Gaidis AMoreira JSun KMilburn AAtlidakis VKemerlis V(2023)FineIBT: Fine-grain Control-flow Enforcement with Indirect Branch TrackingProceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses10.1145/3607199.3607219(527-546)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607199.3607219
Xie MLin YLuo CPeng GFu J(2023)PointerScope: Understanding Pointer Patching for Code RandomizationIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2022.320304320:4(3019-3036)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2022.3203043
Sun RGuo YWang ZZeng Q(2023)AttnCall: Refining Indirect Call Targets in Binaries with AttentionComputer Security – ESORICS 202310.1007/978-3-031-51482-1_20(391-409)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-51482-1_20
Ding ZGuo YXu HYan LCui LPeng YCheng FHao Z(2023)SeqTrace: API Call Tracing Based on Intel PT and VMI for Malware DetectionAlgorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing10.1007/978-3-031-22677-9_6(98-116)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22677-9_6
Zhang WXu ZXiao YXue Y(2022)Unleashing the power of pseudo-code for binary code similarity analysisCybersecurity10.1186/s42400-022-00121-05:1Online publication date: 1-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-022-00121-0
Singhal VPillai ASaumya CKulkarni MMachiry A(2022)Cornucopia : A Framework for Feedback Guided Generation of BinariesProceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3551349.3561152(1-13)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551349.3561152
Zhang YLiu XSun CZeng DTan GKan XMa S(2021)ReCFA: Resilient Control-Flow AttestationAnnual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3485832.3485900(311-322)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1145/3485832.3485900
Pang CYu RChen YKoskinen EPortokalidis GMao BXu J(2021)SoK: All You Ever Wanted to Know About x86/x64 Binary Disassembly But Were Afraid to Ask2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP40001.2021.00012(833-851)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP40001.2021.00012
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