Practical Context-Sensitive CFI

Current Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) implementations track control edges individually, insensitive to the context of preceding edges. Recent work demonstrates that this leaves sufficient leeway for powerful ROP attacks. Context-sensitive CFI, which can provide enhanced security, is widely considered impractical for real-world adoption. Our work shows that Context-sensitive CFI (CCFI) for both the backward and forward edge can be implemented efficiently on commodity hardware. We present PathArmor, a binary-level CCFI implementation which tracks paths to sensitive program states, and defines the set of valid control edges within the state context to yield higher precision than existing CFI implementations. Even with simple context-sensitive policies, PathArmor yields significantly stronger CFI invariants than context-insensitive CFI, with similar performance. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.4.6 [Operating Systems]: Security and Protection General Terms Security Keywords Control-...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Victor van der Veen, Dennis Andriesse, Enes Göktas, Ben Gras, Lionel Sambuc, Asia Slowinska, Herbert Bos, Cristiano Giuffrida
• Keywords: CCS 2015, Security Privacy