ROP Gadget Prevalence and Survival Under Compiler-based Binary Diversification Schemes

Diversity has been suggested as an effective alternative to the current trend in rules-based approaches to cybersecurity. However, little work to date has focused on how various techniques generalize to new attacks. That is, there is no accepted methodology that researchers use to evaluate diversity techniques. Starting with the hypothesis that an attacker's effort increases as the common set of executable code snippets (return-oriented programming (ROP) gadgets) decreases across application variants, we explore how different diversification techniques affect the set of ROP gadgets that is available to an attacker. We show that a small population of diversified variants is sufficient to eliminate 90-99% of ROP gadgets across a collection of real-world applications. Finally, we observe that the number of remaining gadgets may still be sufficient for an attacker to mount an effective attack regardless of the presence of software diversity.