Data Space Randomization

Over the past several years, US-CERT advisories, as well as most critical updates from software vendors, have been due to memory corruption vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows, heap overflows, etc. Several techniques have been developed to defend against the exploitation of these vulnerabilities, with the most promising defenses being based on randomization. Two randomization techniques have been explored so far: address space randomization (ASR) that randomizes the location of objects in virtual memory, and instruction set randomization (ISR) that randomizes the representation of code. We explore a third form of randomization called data space randomization (DSR) that randomizes the representation of data stored in program memory. Unlike ISR, DSR is effective against non-control data attacks as well as code injection attacks. Unlike ASR, it can protect against corruption of nonpointer data as well as pointer-valued data. Moreover, DSR provides a much higher range of randomiza...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DIMVA
• Authors: Sandeep Bhatkar, R. Sekar
• Keywords: Computer Networks, DIMVA 2007, DIMVA 2008, Randomization, Randomization Called Data, Space Randomization