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Watchdog Monitoring for Detecting and Handling of Control Flow Hijack on RISC-V-based Binaries
Oyinloye, Toyosi Speakman, Lee Eze, Thaddeus O'Mahony, Lucas
Oyinloye, Toyosi
Speakman, Lee
Eze, Thaddeus
O'Mahony, Lucas
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EPub Date
Publication Date
2022-08-31
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Abstract
Abstract—Control flow hijacking has been a major challenge in software security. Several means of protections have been developed but insecurities persist. This is because existing protections have sometimes been circumvented while some resilient protections do not cover all applications. Studies have revealed that a holistic way of tackling software insecurity could involve watchdog monitoring and detection via Control Flow Integrity (CFI). The CFI concept has shown a good measure of reliability to mitigate control flow hijacking. However, sophisticated attack techniques in the form of Return Oriented Programming (ROP) have persisted. A flexible protection is desirable, which not only covers as many architecture structures as possible but also mitigates known resilient attacks like ROP. The solution proffered here is a hybrid of CFI and watchdog timing via inter-process signaling (IP-CFI). It is a software-based protection that involves recompilation of the target program. The implementation here is on vulnerable RISC-V-based process but is flexible and could be adapted on other architectures. We present a proof of concept in IP-CFI which when applied to a vulnerable program, ROP is mitigated. The target program incurs a run-time overhead of 1.5%. The code is available.
Citation
Oyinloye, T., Speakman, L., Eze, T., & O’Mahony, L. (2022). Watchdog monitoring for detecting and handling of control flow hijack on RISC-V-based Binaries. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 13(8), 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2022.0130896
Publisher
SAI Organization
Journal
International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications
Research Unit
DOI
10.14569/IJACSA.2022.0130896
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PubMed Central ID
Type
Article
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Series/Report no.
ISSN
2158-107X
EISSN
2156-5570