On protection by layout randomization

Abstract—Layout randomization is a powerful, popular tech-nique for software protection. We present it and study it in programming-language terms. More specifically, we consider layout randomization as part of an implementation for a high-level programming language; the implementation translates this language to a lower-level language in which memory addresses are numbers. We analyze this implementation, by re-lating low-level attacks against the implementation to contexts in the high-level programming language, and by establishing full abstraction results. I