Biblio

Modern software development and deployment practices encourage complexity and bloat while unintentionally sacrificing efficiency and security. A major driver in this is the overwhelming emphasis on programmers' productivity. The constant demands to speed up development while reducing costs have forced a series of individual decisions and approaches throughout software engineering history that have led to this point. The current state-of-the-practice in the field is a patchwork of architectures and frameworks, packed full of features in order to appeal to: the greatest number of people, obscure use cases, maximal code reuse, and minimal developer effort. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) Total Platform Cyber Protection (TPCP) program seeks to de-bloat software binaries late in the life-cycle with little or no access to the source code or the development process.

Object flow integrity (OFI) augments control-flow integrity (CFI) and software fault isolation (SFI) protections with secure, first-class support for binary object exchange across inter-module trust boundaries. This extends both source-aware and source-free CFI and SFI technologies to a large class of previously unsupported software: those containing immutable system modules with large, object-oriented APIs—which are particularly common in component-based, event-driven consumer software. It also helps to protect these inter-module object exchanges against confused deputy-assisted vtable corruption and counterfeit object-oriented programming attacks. A prototype implementation for Microsoft Component Object Model demonstrates that OFI is scalable to large interfaces on the order of tens of thousands of methods, and exhibits low overheads of under 1% for some common-case applications. Significant elements of the implementation are synthesized automatically through a principled design inspired by type-based contracts.