Address Space Layout Permutation (ASLP): Towards Fine-Grained Randomization of Commodity Software

Address space randomization is an emerging and promising method for stopping a broad range of memory corruption attacks. By randomly shifting critical memory regions at process initialization time, address space randomization converts an otherwise successful malicious attack into a benign process crash. However, existing approaches either introduce insufficient randomness, or require source code modification. While insufficient randomness allows successful brute-force attacks, as shown in recent studies, the required source code modification prevents this effective method from being used for commodity software, which is the major source of exploited vulnerabilities on the Internet. We propose Address Space Layout Permutation (ASLP) that introduces high degree of randomness (or high entropy) with minimal performance overhead. Essential to ASLP is a novel binary rewriting tool that can place the static code and data segments of a compiled executable to a randomly specified location...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACSAC
• Authors: Chongkyung Kil, Jinsuk Jun, Christopher Bookholt, Jun Xu, Peng Ning
• Keywords: ACSAC 2006, Address Space Randomization, Insufficient Randomness, Security Privacy, Source Code Modification