Code pointer masking: Hardening applications against code injection attacks

Abstract

In this paper we present an efficient countermeasure against code injection attacks. Our countermeasure does not rely on secret values such as stack canaries and protects against attacks that are not addressed by state-of-the-art countermeasures of similar performance. By enforcing the correct semantics of code pointers, we thwart attacks that modify code pointers to divert the application's control flow. We have implemented a prototype of our solution in a C-compiler for Linux. The evaluation shows that the overhead of using our countermeasure is small and the security benefits are substantial. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.