Biblio

Legacy programs are normally monolithic (that is, all code runs in a single process and is not partitioned), and a bug in a program may result in the entire program being vulnerable and therefore untrusted. Program partitioning can be used to separate a program into multiple partitions, so as to isolate sensitive data or privileged operations. Manual program partitioning requires programmers to rewrite the entire source code, which is cumbersome, error-prone, and not generic. Automatic program partitioning tools can separate programs according to the dependency graph constructed based on data or programs. However, programmers still need to manually implement remote service interfaces for inter-partition communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose AutoSlicer, whose purpose is to partition a program more automatically, so that the programmer is only required to annotate sensitive data. AutoSlicer constructs accurate data dependency graphs (DDGs) by enabling execution flow graphs, and the DDG-based partitioning algorithm can compute partition information based on sensitive annotations. In addition, the code refactoring toolchain can automatically transform the source code into sensitive and insensitive partitions that can be deployed on the remote procedure call framework. The experimental evaluation shows that AutoSlicer can effectively improve the accuracy (13%-27%) of program partitioning by enabling EFG, and separate real-world programs with a relatively smaller performance overhead (0.26%-9.42%).

Runtime memory vulnerabilities, especially present in widely used languages as C and C++, are exploited by attackers to corrupt code pointers and hijack the execution flow of a program running on a target system to force it to behave abnormally. This is the principle of modern Code Reuse Attacks (CRAs) and of famous attack paradigms as Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) and Jump-Oriented Programming (JOP), which have defeated the previous defenses against malicious code injection such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP). Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is a promising approach to protect against such runtime attacks. Recently, many CFI solutions have been proposed, with both hardware and software implementations. But how can a defense based on complying with a graph calculated a priori efficiently deal with something unpredictable as exceptions and interrupt requests? The present paper focuses on this dichotomy by analysing some of the CFI-based defenses and showing how the unexpected trigger of an interrupt and the sudden execution of an Interrupt Service Routine (ISR) can circumvent them.