Ropecker: A generic and practical approach for defending against rop attacks

Abstract—Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is a sophis-ticated exploitation technique that is able to drive target applica-tions to perform arbitrary unintended operations by constructing a gadget chain reusing existing small code sequences (gadgets). Existing defense mechanisms either only handle specific types of gadgets, require access to source code and/or a customized compiler, break the integrity of application binary, or suffer from high performance overhead. In this paper, we present a novel system, ROPecker, to efficiently and effectively defend against ROP attacks withou