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305
Dynamic taint analysis for automatic detection, analysis, and signature generation of exploits on commodity software
- In Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium
, 2005
"... Software vulnerabilities have had a devastating effect on the Internet. Worms such as CodeRed and Slammer can compromise hundreds of thousands of hosts within hours or even minutes, and cause millions of dollars of damage [32, 51]. To successfully combat these fast automatic Internet attacks, we nee ..."
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Cited by 647 (32 self)
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Software vulnerabilities have had a devastating effect on the Internet. Worms such as CodeRed and Slammer can compromise hundreds of thousands of hosts within hours or even minutes, and cause millions of dollars of damage [32, 51]. To successfully combat these fast automatic Internet attacks, we need fast automatic attack detection and filtering mechanisms. In this paper we propose dynamic taint analysis for automatic detection and analysis of overwrite attacks, which include most types of exploits. This approach does not need source code or special compilation for the monitored program, and hence works on commodity software. To demonstrate this idea, we have implemented TaintCheck, a mechanism that can perform dynamic taint analysis by performing binary rewriting at run time. We show that TaintCheck reliably detects most types of exploits. We found that TaintCheck produced no false positives for any of the many different programs that we tested. Further, we show how we can use a two-tiered approach to build a hybrid exploit detector that enjoys the same accuracy as TaintCheck but have extremely low performance overhead. Finally, we propose a new type of automatic signature generation—semanticanalysis based signature generation. We show that by backtracing the chain of tainted data structure rooted at the detection point, TaintCheck can automatically identify which original flow and which part of the original flow have caused the attack and identify important invariants of the payload that can be used as signatures. Semantic-analysis based signature generation can be more accurate, resilient against polymorphic worms, and robust to attacks exploiting polymorphism than the pattern-extraction based signature generation methods.
Vigilante: End-to-End Containment of Internet Worm Epidemics
, 2008
"... Worm containment must be automatic because worms can spread too fast for humans to respond. Recent work proposed network-level techniques to automate worm containment; these techniques have limitations because there is no information about the vulnerabilities exploited by worms at the network level. ..."
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Cited by 304 (6 self)
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Worm containment must be automatic because worms can spread too fast for humans to respond. Recent work proposed network-level techniques to automate worm containment; these techniques have limitations because there is no information about the vulnerabilities exploited by worms at the network level. We propose Vigilante, a new end-to-end architecture to contain worms automatically that addresses these limitations. In Vigilante, hosts detect worms by instrumenting vulnerable programs to analyze infection attempts. We introduce dynamic data-flow analysis: a broad-coverage host-based algorithm that can detect unknown worms by tracking the flow of data from network messages and disallowing unsafe uses of this data. We also show how to integrate other host-based detection mechanisms into the Vigilante architecture. Upon detection, hosts generate self-certifying alerts (SCAs), a new type of security alert that can be inexpensively verified by any vulnerable host. Using SCAs, hosts can cooperate to contain an outbreak, without having to trust each other. Vigilante broadcasts SCAs over an overlay network that propagates alerts rapidly and resiliently. Hosts receiving an SCA protect themselves by generating filters with vulnerability condition slicing: an algorithm that performs dynamic analysis of the vulnerable program to identify control-flow conditions that lead
Secure Program Execution via Dynamic Information Flow Tracking
, 2004
"... Dynamic information flow tracking is a hardware mechanism to protect programs against malicious attacks by identifying spurious information flows and restricting the usage of spurious information. Every security attack to take control of a program needs to transfer the program’s control to malevolen ..."
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Cited by 271 (3 self)
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Dynamic information flow tracking is a hardware mechanism to protect programs against malicious attacks by identifying spurious information flows and restricting the usage of spurious information. Every security attack to take control of a program needs to transfer the program’s control to malevolent code. In our approach, the operating system identifies a set of input channels as spurious, and the processor tracks all information flows from those inputs. A broad range of attacks are effectively defeated by disallowing the spurious data to be used as instructions or jump target addresses. We describe two different security policies that track differing sets of dependencies. Implementing the first policy only incurs, on average, a memory overhead of 0.26 % and a performance degradation of 0.02%. This policy does not require any modification of executables. The stronger policy incurs, on average, a memory overhead of 4.5 % and a performance degradation of 0.8%, and requires binary annotation. 1
Backtracking intrusions
, 2003
"... Analyzing intrusions today is an arduous, largely manual task because system administrators lack the information and tools needed to understand easily the sequence of steps that occurred in an attack. The goal of BackTracker is to identify automatically potential sequences of steps that occurred in ..."
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Cited by 240 (11 self)
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Analyzing intrusions today is an arduous, largely manual task because system administrators lack the information and tools needed to understand easily the sequence of steps that occurred in an attack. The goal of BackTracker is to identify automatically potential sequences of steps that occurred in an intrusion. Starting with a single detection point (e.g., a suspicious file), BackTracker identifies files and processes that could have affected that detection point and displays chains of events in a dependency graph. We use BackTracker to analyze several real attacks against computers that we set up as honeypots. In each case, BackTracker is able to highlight effectively the entry point used to gain access to the system and the sequence of steps from that entry point to the point at which we noticed the intrusion. The logging required to support BackTracker added 9 % overhead in running time and generated 1.2 GB per day of log data for an operating-system intensive workload.
Countering Code-Injection Attacks With Instruction-Set Randomization
- In Proceedings of the ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Conference
, 2003
"... We describe a new, general approach for safeguarding systems against any type of code-injection attack. We apply Kerckhoff’s principle, by creating process-specific randomized instruction sets (e.g., machine instructions) of the system executing potentially vulnerable software. An attacker who does ..."
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Cited by 234 (26 self)
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We describe a new, general approach for safeguarding systems against any type of code-injection attack. We apply Kerckhoff’s principle, by creating process-specific randomized instruction sets (e.g., machine instructions) of the system executing potentially vulnerable software. An attacker who does not know the key to the randomization algorithm will inject code that is invalid for that randomized processor, causing a runtime exception. To determine the difficulty of integrating support for the proposed mechanism in the operating system, we modified the Linux kernel, the GNU binutils tools, and the bochs-x86 emulator. Although the performance penalty is significant, our prototype demonstrates the feasibility of the approach, and should be directly usable on a suitable-modified processor (e.g., the Transmeta Crusoe). Our approach is equally applicable against code-injecting attacks in scripting and interpreted languages, e.g., web-based SQL injection. We demonstrate this by modifying the Perl interpreter to permit randomized script execution. The performance penalty in this case is minimal. Where our proposed approach is feasible (i.e., in an emulated environment, in the presence of programmable or specialized hardware, or in interpreted languages), it can serve as a low-overhead protection mechanism, and can easily complement other mechanisms.
SecVisor: A Tiny Hypervisor to Provide Lifetime Kernel Code Integrity for Commodity OSes
- SOSP'07
, 2007
"... We propose SecVisor, a tiny hypervisor that ensures code integrity for commodity OS kernels. In particular, SecVisor ensures that only user-approved code can execute in kernel mode over the entire system lifetime. This protects the kernel against code injection attacks, such as kernel rootkits. SecV ..."
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Cited by 217 (10 self)
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We propose SecVisor, a tiny hypervisor that ensures code integrity for commodity OS kernels. In particular, SecVisor ensures that only user-approved code can execute in kernel mode over the entire system lifetime. This protects the kernel against code injection attacks, such as kernel rootkits. SecVisor can achieve this property even against an attacker who controls everything but the CPU, the memory controller, and system memory chips. Further, SecVisor can even defend against attackers with knowledge of zero-day kernel exploits. Our goal is to make SecVisor amenable to formal verification and manual audit, thereby making it possible to rule out known classes of vulnerabilities. To this end, SecVisor offers small code size and small external interface. We rely on memory virtualization to build SecVisor and implement two versions, one using software memory virtualization and the other using CPU-supported memory virtualization. The code sizes of the runtime portions of these versions are 1739 and 1112 lines, respectively. The size of the external interface for both versions of SecVisor is 2 hypercalls. It is easy to port OS kernels to SecVisor. We port the Linux kernel version 2.6.20 by adding 12 lines and deleting 81 lines, out of a total of approximately 4.3 million lines of code in the kernel.
Minos: Control Data Attack Prevention Orthogonal to Memory Model
, 2004
"... We introduce Minos, a microarchitecture that implements Biba's low-water-mark integrity policy on individual words of data. Minos stops attacks that corrupt control data to hijack program control flow but is orthogonal to the memory model. Control data is any data which is loaded into the progr ..."
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Cited by 202 (16 self)
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We introduce Minos, a microarchitecture that implements Biba's low-water-mark integrity policy on individual words of data. Minos stops attacks that corrupt control data to hijack program control flow but is orthogonal to the memory model. Control data is any data which is loaded into the program counter on control flow transfer, or any data used to calculate such data. The key is that Minos tracks the integrity of all data, but protects control flow by checking this integrity when a program uses the data for control transfer. Existing policies, in contrast, need to differentiate between control and non-control data a priori, a task made impossible by coercions between pointers and other data types such as integers in the C language.
Understanding data lifetime via whole system simulation
- In USENIX Security Symposium
, 2004
"... Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for noncommercial reproduction of the work for educational or research purposes. This copyright notice must be included in the reproduced paper. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks herein. ..."
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Cited by 197 (5 self)
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Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for noncommercial reproduction of the work for educational or research purposes. This copyright notice must be included in the reproduced paper. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks herein.
An Infrastructure for Adaptive Dynamic Optimization
, 2003
"... Dynamic optimization is emerging as a promising approach to overcome many of the obstacles of traditional static compilation. But while there are a number of compiler infrastructures for developing static optimizations, there are very few for developing dynamic optimizations. We present a framework ..."
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Cited by 189 (6 self)
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Dynamic optimization is emerging as a promising approach to overcome many of the obstacles of traditional static compilation. But while there are a number of compiler infrastructures for developing static optimizations, there are very few for developing dynamic optimizations. We present a framework for implementing dynamic analyses and optimizations. We provide an interface for building external modules, or clients, for the DynamoRIO dynamic code modification system. This interface abstracts away many low-level details of the DynamoRIO runtime system while exposing a simple and powerful, yet efficient and lightweight, API. This is achieved by restricting optimization units to linear streams of code and using adaptive levels of detail for representing instructions. The interface is not restricted to optimization and can be used for instrumentation, profiling, dynamic translation, etc.. To demonstrate
Information flow control for standard OS abstractions
- IN SOSP
, 2007
"... Decentralized Information Flow Control (DIFC) [24] is an approach to security that allows application writers to control how data flows between the pieces of an application and the outside world. As applied to privacy, DIFC allows untrusted software to compute with private data while trusted securit ..."
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Cited by 189 (11 self)
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Decentralized Information Flow Control (DIFC) [24] is an approach to security that allows application writers to control how data flows between the pieces of an application and the outside world. As applied to privacy, DIFC allows untrusted software to compute with private data while trusted security code controls the release of that data. As applied to integrity, DIFC allows trusted code to protect untrusted software from unexpected malicious inputs. In either case, only bugs in the trusted code, which tends to be small and isolated, can lead to security violations. We present Flume, a new DIFC model and system that applies at the granularity of operating system processes and standard OS abstractions (e.g., pipes and file descriptors). Flume eases DIFC’s use in existing applications and allows safe interaction between conventional and DIFC-aware processes. Flume runs as a user-level reference monitor on Linux. A process confined by Flume cannot perform most system calls directly; instead, an interposition layer replaces system calls with IPC to the reference monitor, which enforces data flow policies and performs safe operations on the process’s behalf. We ported a complex Web application (MoinMoin wiki) to Flume, changing only 2 % of the original code. The Flume version is roughly 30–40 % slower due to overheads in our current implementation but supports additional security policies impossible without DIFC.
