Protecting Against Unexpected System Calls
Protecting Against Unexpected System Calls C. M. Linn, M. Rajagopalan, S. Baker, C. Collberg, S. K. Debray, J. H. Hartman Department of Computer Science University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 {linnc,mohan,bakers,collberg,debray,jhh}@cs.arizona.edu Abstract writing the return address on the stack with the address of the attack code). This then causes the various actions This paper proposes a comprehensive set of techniques relating to the attack to be carried out. which limit the scope of remote code injection attacks. These techniques prevent any injected code from mak- In order to do any real damage, e.g., create a root ing system calls and thus restrict the capabilities of an shell, change permissions on a file, or access proscribed attacker. In defending against the traditional ways of data, the attack code needs to execute one or more sys- harming a system these techniques significantly raise the tem calls. Because of this, and the well-defined system bar for compromising the host system forcing the attack call interface between application code and the underly- code to take extraordinary steps that may be impractical ing operating system kernel, many researchers have fo- in the context of a remote code injection attack. There cused on the system call interface as a convenient point are two main aspects to our approach. The first is to for detecting and disrupting such attacks (see, for exam- embed semantic information into executables identify- ple, [5, 13, 17, 19, 29, 32, 35, 38]; Section 7 gives a more ing the locations of legitimate system call instructions; extensive discussion).
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