CS Forum: Lucas Davi

The Continuing Arms Race in Memory: Return-Oriented Programming Attacks and Defenses

   Speaker: Dr. Lucas Davi

   Speaker affiliation: Technische

   Universität Darmstadt, Germany

   Host: Prof. N. Asokan

   Time: 14:15-15:00 (coffee from 14:00)

   Venue: T2 in CS building

The Continuing Arms Race in Memory: Return-Oriented Programming Attacks and Defenses

Abstract

Code-reuse attacks such as return-oriented programming constitute a powerful zero-day exploitation technique that is frequently leveraged to compromise software on a wide range of architectures. These attacks generate malicious computation based on existing code (so-called gadgets) residing in linked libraries. The good news is that both academia and industry have proposed defense techniques to mitigate code-reuse attacks. On the other hand, a continuous arms race has evolved between attacks and defenses. In this talk, we will elaborate on the evolution of code-reuse attacks. In particular, we explore two prominent defense techniques: control-flow integrity (CFI) and code randomization. We demonstrate that existing defenses, including Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), can be bypassed with advanced code-reuse attack techniques. Further, we discuss promising research directions such as hardware-assisted defenses, attestation of a program’s control flows, and protection against these attacks at the kernel layer.

Bio

Lucas Davi is an independent Claude Shannon research group leader of the Secure and Trustworthy Systems group at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. He received his PhD from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany in computer science. He is also a researcher at the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (ICRI-SC). His research focuses on software exploitation technique and defenses. In particular, he explores code-reuse attacks and defenses for ARM and Intel-based systems.