Function-Oriented Programming: A New Class of Code Reuse Attack in C Applications

Control-hijacking attacks include code injection attacks and code reuse attacks. In recent years, with the emergence of the defense mechanism data-execution prevention(DEP), code reuse attacks have become mainstream, such as return-oriented programming(ROP), Jump-Oriented Programming(JOP), and Counterfeit Object-oriented Programming(COOP). And a series of defensive measures have been proposed, such as DEP, address space layout randomization (ASLR), coarse-grained Control-Flow Integrity(CFI) and fine-grained CFI. In this paper, we propose a new attack called function-oriented programming(FOP) to construct malicious program behavior. FOP takes advantage of the existing function of the C program to induce attack. We propose concrete algorithms for FOP gadgets and build a tool to identify FOP gadgets. FOP can successfully bypass coarse-grained CFI, and FOP also can bypass some existing fine-grained CFI technologies, such as shadow stack technology. We show a real-world attack for proftpd1.3.0 server in the Linux x64 environment. We believe that the FOP attack will encourage people to come up with more effective defense measures.