Memory Safety for Low-Level Software/Hardware Interactions
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Defeating Memory Corruption Attacks Via Pointer Taintedness Detection
Defeating Memory Corruption Attacks via Pointer Taintedness Detection Shuo Chen †, Jun Xu ‡, Nithin Nakka †, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk †, Ravishankar K. Iyer † † Center for Reliable and High-Performance Computing, ‡ Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, North Carolina State University 1308 W. Main Street, Urbana, IL 61801 Raleigh, NC 27695 {shuochen, nakka, kalbar, iyer}@crhc.uiuc.edu [email protected] Abstract formal methods have been adopted to prevent Most malicious attacks compromise system security programmers from writing insecure software. But despite through memory corruption exploits. Recently proposed substantial research and investment, the state of the art is techniques attempt to defeat these attacks by protecting far from perfect, and as a result, security vulnerabilities are program control data. We have constructed a new class of constantly being discovered in the field. The most direct attacks that can compromise network applications without counter-measure against vulnerabilities in the field is tampering with any control data. These non-control data security patching. Patching, however, is reactive in nature attacks represent a new challenge to system security. In and can only be applied to known vulnerabilities. The long this paper, we propose an architectural technique to latency between bug discovery and patching allows defeat both control data and non-control data attacks attackers to compromise many unpatched systems. An based on the notion of pointer taintedness . A pointer is alternative to patching is runtime vulnerability masking said to be tainted if user input can be used as the pointer that can stop ongoing attacks. Compiler and library value. A security attack is detected whenever a tainted interception techniques have been proposed to mask value is dereferenced during program execution. -
Representing and Reasoning About Dynamic Code
Representing and reasoning about dynamic code Item Type Proceedings Authors Bartels, Jesse; Stephens, Jon; Debray, Saumya Citation Bartels, J., Stephens, J., & Debray, S. (2020, September). Representing and Reasoning about Dynamic Code. In 2020 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) (pp. 312-323). IEEE. DOI 10.1145/3324884.3416542 Publisher ACM Journal Proceedings - 2020 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2020 Rights © 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. Download date 23/09/2021 23:26:56 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Version Final accepted manuscript Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/652285 Representing and Reasoning about Dynamic Code Jesse Bartels Jon Stephens Saumya Debray Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science The University Of Arizona University Of Texas The University Of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721, USA Austin, TX 78712, USA Tucson, AZ 85721, USA [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT and trace dependencies back, into and through the JIT compiler’s Dynamic code, i.e., code that is created or modified at runtime, is code, to understand the data and control flows that influenced the ubiquitous in today’s world. The behavior of dynamic code can JIT compiler’s actions and caused the generation of the problem- depend on the logic of the dynamic code generator in subtle and non- atic code. E.g., for the CVE-2017-5121 bug mentioned above, we obvious ways, e.g., JIT compiler bugs can lead to exploitable vul- might want to perform automated analyses to identify which anal- nerabilities in the resulting JIT-compiled code. -
An In-Depth Study with All Rust Cves
Memory-Safety Challenge Considered Solved? An In-Depth Study with All Rust CVEs HUI XU, School of Computer Science, Fudan University ZHUANGBIN CHEN, Dept. of CSE, The Chinese University of Hong Kong MINGSHEN SUN, Baidu Security YANGFAN ZHOU, School of Computer Science, Fudan University MICHAEL R. LYU, Dept. of CSE, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Rust is an emerging programing language that aims at preventing memory-safety bugs without sacrificing much efficiency. The claimed property is very attractive to developers, and many projects start usingthe language. However, can Rust achieve the memory-safety promise? This paper studies the question by surveying 186 real-world bug reports collected from several origins which contain all existing Rust CVEs (common vulnerability and exposures) of memory-safety issues by 2020-12-31. We manually analyze each bug and extract their culprit patterns. Our analysis result shows that Rust can keep its promise that all memory-safety bugs require unsafe code, and many memory-safety bugs in our dataset are mild soundness issues that only leave a possibility to write memory-safety bugs without unsafe code. Furthermore, we summarize three typical categories of memory-safety bugs, including automatic memory reclaim, unsound function, and unsound generic or trait. While automatic memory claim bugs are related to the side effect of Rust newly-adopted ownership-based resource management scheme, unsound function reveals the essential challenge of Rust development for avoiding unsound code, and unsound generic or trait intensifies the risk of introducing unsoundness. Based on these findings, we propose two promising directions towards improving the security of Rust development, including several best practices of using specific APIs and methods to detect particular bugs involving unsafe code. -
Project Snowflake: Non-Blocking Safe Manual Memory Management in .NET
Project Snowflake: Non-blocking Safe Manual Memory Management in .NET Matthew Parkinson Dimitrios Vytiniotis Kapil Vaswani Manuel Costa Pantazis Deligiannis Microsoft Research Dylan McDermott Aaron Blankstein Jonathan Balkind University of Cambridge Princeton University July 26, 2017 Abstract Garbage collection greatly improves programmer productivity and ensures memory safety. Manual memory management on the other hand often delivers better performance but is typically unsafe and can lead to system crashes or security vulnerabilities. We propose integrating safe manual memory management with garbage collection in the .NET runtime to get the best of both worlds. In our design, programmers can choose between allocating objects in the garbage collected heap or the manual heap. All existing applications run unmodified, and without any performance degradation, using the garbage collected heap. Our programming model for manual memory management is flexible: although objects in the manual heap can have a single owning pointer, we allow deallocation at any program point and concurrent sharing of these objects amongst all the threads in the program. Experimental results from our .NET CoreCLR implementation on real-world applications show substantial performance gains especially in multithreaded scenarios: up to 3x savings in peak working sets and 2x improvements in runtime. 1 Introduction The importance of garbage collection (GC) in modern software cannot be overstated. GC greatly improves programmer productivity because it frees programmers from the burden of thinking about object lifetimes and freeing memory. Even more importantly, GC prevents temporal memory safety errors, i.e., uses of memory after it has been freed, which often lead to security breaches. Modern generational collectors, such as the .NET GC, deliver great throughput through a combination of fast thread-local bump allocation and cheap collection of young objects [63, 18, 61]. -
Ensuring the Spatial and Temporal Memory Safety of C at Runtime
MemSafe: Ensuring the Spatial and Temporal Memory Safety of C at Runtime Matthew S. Simpson, Rajeev K. Barua Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Maryland, College Park College Park, MD 20742-3256, USA fsimpsom, [email protected] Abstract—Memory access violations are a leading source of dereferencing pointers obtained from invalid pointer arith- unreliability in C programs. As evidence of this problem, a vari- metic; and dereferencing uninitialized, NULL or “manufac- ety of methods exist that retrofit C with software checks to detect tured” pointers.1 A temporal error is a violation caused by memory errors at runtime. However, these methods generally suffer from one or more drawbacks including the inability to using a pointer whose referent has been deallocated (e.g. with detect all errors, the use of incompatible metadata, the need for free) and is no longer a valid object. The most well-known manual code modifications, and high runtime overheads. temporal violations include dereferencing “dangling” point- In this paper, we present a compiler analysis and transforma- ers to dynamically allocated memory and freeing a pointer tion for ensuring the memory safety of C called MemSafe. Mem- more than once. Dereferencing pointers to automatically allo- Safe makes several novel contributions that improve upon previ- ous work and lower the cost of safety. These include (1) a method cated memory (stack variables) is also a concern if the address for modeling temporal errors as spatial errors, (2) a compati- of the referent “escapes” and is made available outside the ble metadata representation combining features of object- and function in which it was defined. -
Memory Tagging and How It Improves C/C++ Memory Safety Kostya Serebryany, Evgenii Stepanov, Aleksey Shlyapnikov, Vlad Tsyrklevich, Dmitry Vyukov Google February 2018
Memory Tagging and how it improves C/C++ memory safety Kostya Serebryany, Evgenii Stepanov, Aleksey Shlyapnikov, Vlad Tsyrklevich, Dmitry Vyukov Google February 2018 Introduction 2 Memory Safety in C/C++ 2 AddressSanitizer 2 Memory Tagging 3 SPARC ADI 4 AArch64 HWASAN 4 Compiler And Run-time Support 5 Overhead 5 RAM 5 CPU 6 Code Size 8 Usage Modes 8 Testing 9 Always-on Bug Detection In Production 9 Sampling In Production 10 Security Hardening 11 Strengths 11 Weaknesses 12 Legacy Code 12 Kernel 12 Uninitialized Memory 13 Possible Improvements 13 Precision Of Buffer Overflow Detection 13 Probability Of Bug Detection 14 Conclusion 14 Introduction Memory safety in C and C++ remains largely unresolved. A technique usually called “memory tagging” may dramatically improve the situation if implemented in hardware with reasonable overhead. This paper describes two existing implementations of memory tagging: one is the full hardware implementation in SPARC; the other is a partially hardware-assisted compiler-based tool for AArch64. We describe the basic idea, evaluate the two implementations, and explain how they improve memory safety. This paper is intended to initiate a wider discussion of memory tagging and to motivate the CPU and OS vendors to add support for it in the near future. Memory Safety in C/C++ C and C++ are well known for their performance and flexibility, but perhaps even more for their extreme memory unsafety. This year we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Morris Worm, one of the first known exploitations of a memory safety bug, and the problem is still not solved. -
Memory Management with Explicit Regions by David Edward Gay
Memory Management with Explicit Regions by David Edward Gay Engineering Diploma (Ecole Polytechnique F´ed´erale de Lausanne, Switzerland) 1992 M.S. (University of California, Berkeley) 1997 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA at BERKELEY Committee in charge: Professor Alex Aiken, Chair Professor Susan L. Graham Professor Gregory L. Fenves Fall 2001 The dissertation of David Edward Gay is approved: Chair Date Date Date University of California at Berkeley Fall 2001 Memory Management with Explicit Regions Copyright 2001 by David Edward Gay 1 Abstract Memory Management with Explicit Regions by David Edward Gay Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California at Berkeley Professor Alex Aiken, Chair Region-based memory management systems structure memory by grouping objects in regions under program control. Memory is reclaimed by deleting regions, freeing all objects stored therein. Our compiler for C with regions, RC, prevents unsafe region deletions by keeping a count of references to each region. RC's regions have advantages over explicit allocation and deallocation (safety) and traditional garbage collection (better control over memory), and its performance is competitive with both|from 6% slower to 55% faster on a collection of realistic benchmarks. Experience with these benchmarks suggests that modifying many existing programs to use regions is not difficult. An important innovation in RC is the use of type annotations that make the structure of a program's regions more explicit. These annotations also help reduce the overhead of reference counting from a maximum of 25% to a maximum of 12.6% on our benchmarks. -
Real-Time Operating System in Java
University of Wollongong Theses Collection University of Wollongong Theses Collection University of Wollongong Year Real-time operating system in Java Qinghua Lu University of Wollongong Lu, Qinghua, Real-time operating system in Java, MA thesis, School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Wollongong, 2007. http://ro.uow.edu/theses/29 This paper is posted at Research Online. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/29 Real-time Operating System in Java A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree Master of Computer Science -Research from UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG by Qinghua Lu School of Computer Science & Software Engineering August, 2007 1 Dedicated to My Parents, Lu Changyou and Luo Xiue! 2 The following papers were written as part of this research. 1. McKerrow, P.J., Lu, Q., Zhou, Z.Q. and Chen, L. (2007), Developing real-time systems in Java on Macintosh, Submitted to AUC’07, Apple University Consortium, Gold Coast, September, 23-26, 2007. 2. McKerrow, P.J., Lu, Q., Zhou, Z.Q. and Chen, L. (2007), Software development of embedded systems on Macintosh, Submitted to AUC’07, Apple University Consortium, Gold Coast, September, 23-26, 2007. 3 Declaration I, Qinghua Lu, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Master of Computer Science -Research, in the School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The document has not been submitted for qualifications -
Alpha ELT Listing
Lienholder Name Lienholder Address City State Zip ELT ID 1ST ADVANTAGE FCU PO BX 2116 NEWPORT NEWS VA 23609 CFW 1ST COMMAND BK PO BX 901041 FORT WORTH TX 76101 FXQ 1ST FNCL BK USA 47 SHERMAN HILL RD WOODBURY CT 06798 GVY 1ST LIBERTY FCU PO BX 5002 GREAT FALLS MT 59403 ESY 1ST NORTHERN CA CU 1111 PINE ST MARTINEZ CA 94553 EUZ 1ST NORTHERN CR U 230 W MONROE ST STE 2850 CHICAGO IL 60606 GVK 1ST RESOURCE CU 47 W OXMOOR RD BIRMINGHAM AL 35209 DYW 1ST SECURITY BK WA PO BX 97000 LYNNWOOD WA 98046 FTK 1ST UNITED SVCS CU 5901 GIBRALTAR DR PLEASANTON CA 94588 W95 1ST VALLEY CU 401 W SECOND ST SN BERNRDNO CA 92401 K31 360 EQUIP FIN LLC 300 BEARDSLEY LN STE D201 AUSTIN TX 78746 DJH 360 FCU PO BX 273 WINDSOR LOCKS CT 06096 DBG 4FRONT CU PO BX 795 TRAVERSE CITY MI 49685 FBU 777 EQUIPMENT FIN LLC 600 BRICKELL AVE FL 19 MIAMI FL 33131 FYD A C AUTOPAY PO BX 40409 DENVER CO 80204 CWX A L FNCL CORP PO BX 11907 SANTA ANA CA 92711 J68 A L FNCL CORP PO BX 51466 ONTARIO CA 91761 J90 A L FNCL CORP PO BX 255128 SACRAMENTO CA 95865 J93 A L FNCL CORP PO BX 28248 FRESNO CA 93729 J95 A PLUS FCU PO BX 14867 AUSTIN TX 78761 AYV A PLUS LOANS 500 3RD ST W SACRAMENTO CA 95605 GCC A/M FNCL PO BX 1474 CLOVIS CA 93613 A94 AAA FCU PO BX 3788 SOUTH BEND IN 46619 CSM AAC CU 177 WILSON AVE NW GRAND RAPIDS MI 49534 GET AAFCU PO BX 619001 MD2100 DFW AIRPORT TX 75261 A90 ABLE INC 503 COLORADO ST AUSTIN TX 78701 CVD ABNB FCU 830 GREENBRIER CIR CHESAPEAKE VA 23320 CXE ABOUND FCU PO BX 900 RADCLIFF KY 40159 GKB ACADEMY BANK NA PO BX 26458 KANSAS CITY MO 64196 ATF ACCENTRA CU 400 4TH -
Sok: Make JIT-Spray Great Again
SoK: Make JIT-Spray Great Again Robert Gawlik and Thorsten Holz Ruhr-Universitat¨ Bochum Abstract Attacks against client-side programs such as browsers were at first tackled with a non-executable stack to pre- Since the end of the 20th century, it has become clear that vent execution of data on the stack and also with a non- web browsers will play a crucial role in accessing Internet executable heap to stop heap sprays of data being later resources such as the World Wide Web. They evolved executed as code. This defense became widely known into complex software suites that are able to process a as W ⊕ X (Writable xor eXecutable) or Data Execution multitude of data formats. Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation Prevention (DEP) to make any data region non-executable was incorporated to speed up the execution of script code, in 2003 [45, 54]. To counter DEP, attackers started to per- but is also used besides web browsers for performance form code reuse such as Return-Oriented Programming reasons. Attackers happily welcomed JIT in their own (ROP) and many variants [10, 11, 32, 68]. In general, if an way, and until today, JIT compilers are an important target adversary knows the location of static code in the address of various attacks. This includes for example JIT-Spray, space of the vulnerable target, she can prepare a fake stack JIT-based code-reuse attacks and JIT-specific flaws to cir- with addresses of these gadgets. As soon as control of cumvent mitigation techniques in order to simplify the the instruction pointer is gained, these gadgets execute exploitation of memory-corruption vulnerabilities. -
Rockjit: Securing Just-In-Time Compilation Using Modular Control-Flow Integrity
RockJIT: Securing Just-In-Time Compilation Using Modular Control-Flow Integrity Ben Niu Gang Tan Lehigh University Lehigh University 19 Memorial Dr West 19 Memorial Dr West Bethlehem, PA, 18015 Bethlehem, PA, 18015 [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT For performance, modern managed language implementations Managed languages such as JavaScript are popular. For perfor- adopt Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation. Instead of performing pure mance, modern implementations of managed languages adopt Just- interpretation, a JIT compiler dynamically compiles programs into In-Time (JIT) compilation. The danger to a JIT compiler is that an native code and performs optimization on the fly based on informa- attacker can often control the input program and use it to trigger a tion collected through runtime profiling. JIT compilation in man- vulnerability in the JIT compiler to launch code injection or JIT aged languages is the key to high performance, which is often the spraying attacks. In this paper, we propose a general approach only metric when comparing JIT engines, as seen in the case of called RockJIT to securing JIT compilers through Control-Flow JavaScript. Hereafter, we use the term JITted code for native code Integrity (CFI). RockJIT builds a fine-grained control-flow graph that is dynamically generated by a JIT compiler, and code heap for from the source code of the JIT compiler and dynamically up- memory pages that hold JITted code. dates the control-flow policy when new code is generated on the fly. In terms of security, JIT brings its own set of challenges. First, a Through evaluation on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, we demon- JIT compiler is large and usually written in C/C++, which lacks strate that RockJIT can enforce strong security on a JIT compiler, memory safety. -
Rust: Systems Programmers Can Have Nice Things
Rust: Systems Programmers Can Have Nice Things Arun Thomas [email protected] @arunthomas EuroBSDCon 2019 On Systems Programming [A] systems programmer has seen the terrors of the world and understood the intrinsic horror of existence -James Mickens, The Night Watch 2 What Makes Systems Software Hard? • Stakes are High: Systems software is critical to enforcing security and safety • Kernels, hypervisors, firmware, bootloaders, embedded software, language runtimes, browsers, … • Usually written in C or C++ for performance • BUT C and C++ are not memory-safe • Memory corruption vulnerabilities abound (and are exploited) • See recent Microsoft study (next slide) 3 Memory Unsafety is a Problem https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/16/a-proactive-approach-to-more-secure-code/ Microsoft found ~70% of CVEs in their products each year continue to be memory safety issues (Matt Miller, MSRC @ Blue Hat IL 2019) 4 Microsoft and Rust 5 Intel and Rust 6 Talk Overview “Systems Programmers Can Have Nice Things” -Robert O’Callahan Random Thoughts On Rust • Why Rust? • Rust for Systems Software • Getting Started with Rust on BSD 7 Why ust? 8 I like C. 9 But it turns out programming languages have evolved in the last 50 years. 10 Rust is a safe, fast, productive systems programming language. 11 Mozilla and Rust • Rust was originally created by Mozilla Research • Initial use case: Servo browser engine • Mozilla began shipping Rust components in Firefox 48 in 2016 • Oxidation is Mozilla’s term for “Rusting out” components • Rust code has improved Firefox’s