Biblio

Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is one of the most common techniques to exploit software vulnerabilities. Although many solutions to defend against ROP attacks have been proposed, they still have various drawbacks, such as requiring additional information (source code, debug symbols, etc.), increasing program running cost, and causing program instability. In this paper, we propose a method: using static analysis and binary patch technology to defend against ROP attacks based on return instruction. According to this method, we implemented the AT- ROP tool in a Linux 64-bit system environment. Compared to existing tools, it clears the parameter registers when the function returns. As a result, it makes the binary to defend against ROP attacks based on return instruction without having to obtain the source code of the binary. We use the binary challenges in the CTF competition and the binary programs commonly used in the Linux environment to experiment. It turns out that AT-ROP can make the binary program have the ability to defend against ROP attacks based on return instruction with a small increase in the size of the binary program and without affecting its normal execution.

The return-oriented programming(ROP) attack has been a common access to exploit software vulnerabilities in the modern operating system(OS). An attacker can execute arbitrary code with the aid of ROP despite security mechanisms are involved in OS. In order to mitigate ROP attack, defense mechanisms are also drawn researchers' attention. Besides, research on the benign use of ROP become a hot spot in recent years, since ROP has a perfect resistance to static analysis, which can be adapted to hide some important code. The results in benign use also benefit from a low overhead on program size. The paper discusses the concepts of ROP attack as well as extended ROP attack in recent years. Corresponding defense mechanisms based on randomization, frequency, and control flow integrity are analyzed as well, besides, we also analyzed limitations in this defense mechanisms. Later, we discussed the benign use of ROP in steganography, code integrity verification, and software watermarking, which showed the significant promotion by adopting ROP. At the end of this paper, we looked into the development of ROP attack, the future of possible mitigation strategies and the potential for benign use.