Defeating code reuse attacks with minimal tagged architecture

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2015.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 93-97).In this thesis, we argue that software-based defenses to code reuse attacks are fundamentally flawed. With code pointer integrity as a case study, we show that a secure and efficient software-based defense to code reuse attacks is impossible and thus motivate the case for hardware approaches. We then propose our tagged architecture system Taxi (Tagged C) as a practical defense against code reuse attacks which minimally modifies existing hardware components. We also propose strong defense policies which aim to guarantee security while minimizing tag memory usage. Our Taxi prototype, a modified RISC-V ISA simulator, demonstrates that we can defeat code reuse attacks with high compatibility and low memory overhead.by Samuel Fingeret.M. Eng