Biblio

A3 is an execution management environment that aims to make network-facing applications and services resilient against zero-day attacks. A3 recently underwent two adversarial evaluations of its defensive capabilities. In one, A3 defended an App Store used in a Capture the Flag (CTF) tournament, and in the other, a tactically relevant network service in a red team exercise. This paper describes the A3 defensive technologies evaluated, the evaluation results, and the broader lessons learned about evaluations for technologies that seek to protect critical systems from zero-day attacks.

Memory-based vulnerabilities are a major source of attack vectors. They allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to computers and their data. Previous research has made significant progress in detecting attacks. However, developers still need to locate and fix these vulnerabilities, a mostly manual and time-consuming process. They face a number of challenges. Particularly, the manifestation of an attack does not always coincide with the exploited vulnerabilities, and many attacks are hard to reproduce in the lab environment, leaving developers with limited information to locate them. In this paper, we propose Ravel, an architectural approach to pinpoint vulnerabilities from attacks. Ravel consists of an online attack detector and an offline vulnerability locator linked by a record & replay mechanism. Specifically, Ravel records the execution of a production system and simultaneously monitors it for attacks. If an attack is detected, the execution is replayed to reveal the targeted vulnerabilities by analyzing the program's memory access patterns under attack. We have built a prototype of Ravel based on the open-source FreeBSD operating system. The evaluation results in security and performance demonstrate that Ravel can effectively pinpoint various types of memory vulnerabilities and has low performance overhead.