LMP: light-weighted memory protection with hardware assistance

Despite a long history and numerous proposed defenses, memory corruption attacks are still viable. A secure and low-overhead defense against return-oriented programming (ROP) continues to elude the security community. Currently proposed solutions still must choose between either not fully protecting critical data and relying instead on information hiding, or using incomplete, coarse-grain checking that can be circumvented by a suitably skilled attacker. In this paper, we present a light-weighted memory protection approach (LMP) that uses Intel’s MPX hardware extensions to provide complete, fast ROP protection without having to rely in information hiding. We demonstrate a prototype that defeats ROP attacks while incurring an average runtime overhead of 3.9%.We would like to thank Professor Ding Yuan, Mariana D’Angelo, Michelle Wong, Beom Heyn Kim, Afshar Ganjali, Sukwon Oh, Diego Bravo Velasquez and Peter Sun for their valuable feedback. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and help in improving the quality of this paper. The research in this paper was supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant