Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/1998412.1998434acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageswisecConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Address space randomization for mobile devices

Published: 14 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is a defensive technique supported by many desktop and server operating systems. While smartphone vendors wish to make it available on their platforms, there are technical challenges in implementing ASLR on these devices. Pre-linking, limited processing power and restrictive update processes make it difficult to use existing ASLR implementation strategies even on the latest generation of smartphones. In this paper we introduce retouching, a mechanism for executable ASLR that requires no kernel modifications and is suitable for mobile devices. We have implemented ASLR for the Android operating system and evaluated its effectiveness and performance. In addition, we introduce crash stack analysis, a technique that uses crash reports locally on the device, or in aggregate in the cloud to reliably detect attempts to brute-force ASLR protection. We expect that retouching and crash stack analysis will become standard techniques in mobile ASLR implementations.

References

[1]
Android. www.android.com.
[2]
Ruediger R. Asche. Rebasing win32 dlls: The whole story, 1995. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810432.aspx.
[3]
Sandeep Bhatkar, Daniel C. DuVarney, and R. Sekar. Address obfuscation: an efficient approach to combat a broad range of memory error exploits. In In Proceedings of the 12th USENIX Security Symposium, pages 105--120, 2003.
[4]
Dion Blazakis. Interpreter exploitation: Pointer inference and jit spraying, 2010. http://www.semantiscope.com/research/BHDC2010/BHDC-2010-Paper.pdf.
[5]
Monica Chew and Dawn Song. Mitigating buffer overflows by operating system randomization. Technical report, UC Berkeley, 2002.
[6]
Crispin Cowan, Steve Beattie, John Johansen, and Perry Wagle. Pointguard#8482;: Protecting pointers from buffer overflow vulnerabilities. In In Proc. of the 12th Usenix Security Symposium, 2003.
[7]
Lucas Davi, Alexandra Dmitrienko, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, and Marcel Winandy. Privilege escalation attacks on android. In ISC, pages 346--360, 2010.
[8]
Jake Edge. Linux aslr vulnerabilities, 2009. http://lwn.net/Articles/330866/.
[9]
Hiroaki Etoh. Gcc extension for protecting applications from stack-smashing attacks, 2005. http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/security/ssp/.
[10]
Aurélien Francillon, Daniele Perito, and Claude Castelluccia. Defending embedded systems against control flow attacks. In SecuCode '09: Proceedings of the first ACM workshop on Secure execution of untrusted code, pages 19--26, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.
[11]
Gaurav S. Kc. Countering code-injection attacks with instruction-set randomization. In In Proceedings of the ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Conference, pages 272--280. ACM Press, 2003.
[12]
Chongkyung Kil, Jinsuk Jun, Christopher Bookholt, Jun Xu, and Peng Ning. Address space layout permutation (aslp): Towards fine-grained randomization of commodity software. In ACSAC '06: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pages 339--348, Washington, DC, USA, 2006. IEEE Computer Society.
[13]
J. Krhovjak, V. Matyas, and J. Zizkovsky. Generating Random and Pseudorandom Sequences in Mobile Devices, pages 122--. Springer, 2009.
[14]
David Litchfield. Buffer underruns, dep, aslr and improving the exploitation prevention mechanisms (xpms) on the windows platform, 2005. http://www.ngssoftware.com/papers/xpms.pdf.
[15]
Charlie Miller. Owning the fanboys: Hacking mac os x, 2008. http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-jp-08/bh-jp-08-Miller/BlackHat%-Japan-08-Miller-Hacking-OSX.pdf.
[16]
Charlie Miller. Fuzzing the phone in your phone, 2009. http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/MILLER/BHUSA09-Miller-F%uzzingPhone-PAPER.pdf.
[17]
John Moser. Prelink and address space randomization, 2006. http://lwn.net/Articles/190139/.
[18]
Giampaolo Fresi Roglia, Lorenzo Martignoni, Roberto Paleari, and Danilo Bruschi. Surgically returning to randomized lib(c). In ACSAC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pages 60--69, Washington, DC, USA, 2009. IEEE Computer Society.
[19]
Clint Ruoho. Aslr: Leopard versus vista, 2008. http://www.laconicsecurity.com/aslr-leopard-versus-vista.html.
[20]
Mark Russinovich. Inside the windows vista kernel: Part 3, 2007. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.04.vistakernel.aspx.
[21]
segvguard. http://www.daemon-systems.org/man/security.8.html.
[22]
Hovav Shacham. The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone: Return-into-libc without function calls (on the x86. In In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2007.
[23]
Hovav Shacham, Eu jin Goh, Nagendra Modadugu, Ben Pfaff, and Dan Boneh. On the effectiveness of address-space randomization. In In CCS'04: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pages 298--307. ACM Press, 2004.
[24]
Brad Spengler. Pax: The guaranteed end of arbitrary code execution, 2003. http://grsecurity.net/PaX-presentation_files/frame.htm.
[25]
The PaX Team. Homepage of the pax team, 2008. http://pax.grsecurity.net/.
[26]
Ollie Whitehouse. An analysis of address space layout randomization on windows vista, 2007. http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/reference/Address_Space_Layout_Randomi%zation.pdf.
[27]
Haizhi Xu and Steve J. Chapin. Improving address space randomization with a dynamic offset randomization technique. In SAC '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing, pages 384--391, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)A Tutorial on Moving Target Defense Approaches Within Automotive Cyber-Physical SystemsFrontiers in Future Transportation10.3389/ffutr.2021.7925732Online publication date: 7-Feb-2022
  • (2020)Integrated moving target defense and control reconfiguration for securing Cyber-Physical systemsMicroprocessors & Microsystems10.1016/j.micpro.2019.10295473:COnline publication date: 1-Mar-2020
  • (2019)Address Space Layout Randomization Next GenerationApplied Sciences10.3390/app91429289:14(2928)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2019
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Address space randomization for mobile devices

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    WiSec '11: Proceedings of the fourth ACM conference on Wireless network security
    June 2011
    186 pages
    ISBN:9781450306928
    DOI:10.1145/1998412
    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]

    Sponsors

    In-Cooperation

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 14 June 2011

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. ASLR
    2. android
    3. control ow hijacking
    4. mobile devices
    5. return-to-libc
    6. smartphones

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    WISEC'11
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 98 of 338 submissions, 29%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)8
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 25 Dec 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2022)A Tutorial on Moving Target Defense Approaches Within Automotive Cyber-Physical SystemsFrontiers in Future Transportation10.3389/ffutr.2021.7925732Online publication date: 7-Feb-2022
    • (2020)Integrated moving target defense and control reconfiguration for securing Cyber-Physical systemsMicroprocessors & Microsystems10.1016/j.micpro.2019.10295473:COnline publication date: 1-Mar-2020
    • (2019)Address Space Layout Randomization Next GenerationApplied Sciences10.3390/app91429289:14(2928)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2019
    • (2018)Anatomy of Memory Corruption Attacks and Mitigations in Embedded SystemsIEEE Embedded Systems Letters10.1109/LES.2018.282977710:3(95-98)Online publication date: Sep-2018
    • (2017)On Return Oriented Programming Threats in Android Runtime2017 15th Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST)10.1109/PST.2017.00038(259-2598)Online publication date: Aug-2017
    • (2017)Securing Real-Time Cyber-Physical Systems Using WCET-Aware Artificial Diversity2017 IEEE 15th Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, 15th Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, 3rd Intl Conf on Big Data Intelligence and Computing and Cyber Science and Technology Congress(DASC/PiCom/DataCom/CyberSciTech)10.1109/DASC-PICom-DataCom-CyberSciTec.2017.88(454-461)Online publication date: Nov-2017
    • (2017)Mobile OS and Application ProtocolsWireless Networking and Mobile Data Management10.1007/978-981-10-3941-6_8(217-261)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2017
    • (2016)Jump over ASLRThe 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.5555/3195638.3195686(1-13)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2016
    • (2016)A qualitative framework for evaluating buffer overflow protection mechanismsInternational Journal of Information and Computer Security10.1504/IJICS.2016.0791878:3(272-307)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2016
    • (2016)Code Randomization: Haven’t We Solved This Problem Yet?2016 IEEE Cybersecurity Development (SecDev)10.1109/SecDev.2016.036(124-129)Online publication date: Nov-2016
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media