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CETIS: Retrofitting Intel CET for Generic and Efficient Intra-process Memory Isolation

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Zhe WangAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 2989 - 3002

https://doi.org/10.1145/3548606.3559344

Published: 07 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Intel control-flow enforcement technology (CET) is a new hardware feature available in recent Intel processors. It supports the coarse-grained control-flow integrity for software to defeat memory corruption attacks. In this paper, we retrofit CET, particularly the write-protected shadow pages of CET used for implementing shadow stacks, to develop a generic and efficient intra-process memory isolation mechanism, dubbed CETIS.

To provide user-friendly interfaces, a CETIS framework was developed, which provides memory file abstraction for the isolated memory regions and a set of APIs to access said regions. CETIS also comes with a compiler-assisted tool chain for users to build secure applications easily. The practicality of using CETIS to protect CPI, CFIXX, and JIT-compilers was demonstrated, and the evaluation reveals that CETIS is performed better than state-of-the-art intra-memory isolation mechanisms, such as MPK.

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3669940.3707249
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Index Terms

CETIS: Retrofitting Intel CET for Generic and Efficient Intra-process Memory Isolation
1. Security and privacy
  1. Software and application security

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 2022

3598 pages

ISBN:9781450394505

DOI:10.1145/3548606

General Chairs:
Heng Yin
University of California, Riverside
,
Angelos Stavrou
Virginia Tech
,
Program Chairs:
Cas Cremers
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
,
Elaine Shi
Carnegie Mellon University

Copyright © 2022 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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SIGSAC: ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 07 November 2022

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National Natural Science Foundation of China

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CCS '22

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CCS '22: 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 7 - 11, 2022

CA, Los Angeles, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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Cited By

Narayan SGarfinkel TJohnson EYedidia ZWang YBrown AVahldiek-Oberwagner ALeMay MHuang WWang XSun MTullsen DStefan DEeckhout LSmaragdakis GLiang KSampson AKim MRossbach C(2025)Segue & ColorGuard: Optimizing SFI Performance and Scalability on Modern ArchitecturesProceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 110.1145/3669940.3707249(987-1002)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3669940.3707249
Kim JPark JLee YSong CKim TLee BLuo BLiao XXu JKirda ELie D(2024)PeTAL: Ensuring Access Control Integrity against Data-only Attacks on LinuxProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3690184(2919-2933)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3690184
Momeu MSchnückel SAngnis KPolychronakis MKemerlis VLuo BLiao XXu JKirda ELie D(2024)Safeslab: Mitigating Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities via Memory Protection KeysProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3670279(1345-1359)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3670279
Momeu MKilger FRoemheld CSchnückel SProskurin SPolychronakis MKemerlis VQuek TGao DZhou JCardenas A(2024)ISLAB: Immutable Memory Management Metadata for Commodity Operating System KernelsProceedings of the 19th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3634737.3644994(1159-1172)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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Jacobs AGülmez MAndries AVolckaert SVoulimeneas A(2024)System Call Interposition Without Compromise2024 54th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)10.1109/DSN58291.2024.00030(183-194)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN58291.2024.00030
Xu JXie MWu CZhang YLi QHuang XLai YKang YWang WWei QWang ZMeng WJensen CCremers CKirda E(2023)PANIC: PAN-assisted Intra-process Memory Isolation on ARMProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3623206(919-933)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
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Peng DLiu CPalit TFonseca PVahldiek-Oberwagner AVij M(2023)μSwitch: Fast Kernel Context Isolation with Implicit Context Switches2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46215.2023.10179284(2956-2973)Online publication date: May-2023
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Narayanan VBurtsev A(2023)The Opportunities and Limitations of Extended Page Table Switching for Fine-Grained IsolationIEEE Security and Privacy10.1109/MSEC.2023.325138521:3(16-26)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
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