Fine-grained control-flow integrity through binary hardening

Abstract

Applications written in low-level languages without type or memory safety are prone to memory corruption. Attackers gain code execution capabilities through memory corruption despite all currently deployed defenses. Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is a promising security property that restricts indirect control-flow transfers to a static set of well-known locations. We present Lockdown, a modular, fine-grained CFI policy that protects binary-only applications and libraries without requiring sourcecode. Lockdown adaptively discovers the control-flow graph of a running process based on the executed code. The sandbox component of Lockdown restricts interactions between different shared objects to imported and exported functions by enforcing fine-grained CFI checks using information from a trusted dynamic loader. A shadow stack enforces precise integrity for function returns. Our prototype implementation shows that Lockdown results in low performance overhead and a security analysis discusses any remaining gadgets.