Biblio

Evaluating the security gains brought by software diversity is one key issue of software diversity research, but the existing software diversity evaluation methods are generally based on conventional code features and are relatively single, which are difficult to accurately reflect the security gains brought by software diversity. To solve these problems, from the perspective of return-oriented programming (ROP) attack, we present a software diversity evaluation method which integrates metrics for the quality and distribution of gadgets. Based on the proposed evaluation method and SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, we implement a software diversity evaluation system for compiled languages and script languages. Diversity techniques with different granularities are used to test. The evaluation results show that the proposed evaluation method can accurately and comprehensively reflect the security gains brought by software diversity.

At present, code reuse attacks, such as Return Oriented Programming (ROP), execute attacks through the code of the application itself, bypassing the traditional defense mechanism and seriously threatening the security of computer software. The existing two mainstream defense mechanisms, Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), are vulnerable to information disclosure attacks, and Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) will bring high overhead to programs. At the same time, due to the widespread use of software of unknown origin, there is no source code provided or available, so it is not always possible to secure the source code. In this paper, we propose FRCFI, an effective method based on binary rewriting to prevent code reuse attacks. FRCFI first disrupts the program's memory space layout through function shuffling and NOP insertion, then verifies the execution of the control-flow branch instruction ret and indirect call/jmp instructions to ensure that the target address is not modified by attackers. Experiment show shows that FRCFI can effectively defend against code reuse attacks. After randomization, the survival rate of gadgets is only 1.7%, and FRCFI adds on average 6.1% runtime overhead on SPEC CPU2006 benchmark programs.

The course of operating system's labs usually fall behind the state of art technology. In this paper, we propose a Software Diversity-Assisted Defense (SDAD) lab based on software diversity, mainly targeting for students majoring in cyber security and computer science. This lab is consisted of multiple modules and covers most of the important concepts and principles in operating systems. Thus, the knowledge learned from the theoretical course will be deepened with the lab. For students majoring in cyber security, they can learn this new software diversity-based defense technology and understand how an exploit works from the attacker's side. The experiment is also quite stretchable, which can fit all level students.

Software diversity promises to invert the current balance of power in cybersecurity by preventing exploit reuse. Nevertheless, the comparative evaluation of diversity techniques has received scant attention. In ongoing work, we use the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) environment to assess the effectiveness of diversifying compilers in mitigating exploits. Our approach provides a quantitative comparison of diversity strategies and demonstrates wide variation in their effectiveness.

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.