RICH: Automatically Protecting Against Integer-Based Vulnerabilities David Brumley, Tzi-cker Chiueh, Robert Johnson
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] Huijia Lin, Dawn Song
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract against integer-based attacks. Integer bugs appear because programmers do not antici- We present the design and implementation of RICH pate the semantics of C operations. The C99 standard [16] (Run-time Integer CHecking), a tool for efficiently detecting defines about a dozen rules governinghow integer types can integer-based attacks against C programs at run time. C be cast or promoted. The standard allows several common integer bugs, a popular avenue of attack and frequent pro- cases, such as many types of down-casting, to be compiler- gramming error [1–15], occur when a variable value goes implementation specific. In addition, the written rules are out of the range of the machine word used to materialize it, not accompanied by an unambiguous set of formal rules, e.g. when assigning a large 32-bit int to a 16-bit short. making it difficult for a programmer to verify that he un- We show that safe and unsafe integer operations in C can derstands C99 correctly. Integer bugs are not exclusive to be captured by well-known sub-typing theory. The RICH C. Similar languages such as C++, and even type-safe lan- compiler extension compiles C programs to object code that guages such as Java and OCaml, do not raise exceptions on monitors its own execution to detect integer-based attacks.