DFSI: Enforcing Practical Data Flow Separation and Integrity

Memory corruption vulnerabilities are the root cause of many modern attacks. Numerous defenses have mainly focused on mitigating control-data attacks, leaving modern systems and programs vulnerable to non-control-data (or data-oriented) attacks. Recently, the full power of non-control-data attacks has been revealed. A new technique called data-flow stitching was developed to systematically construct data-oriented attacks without requirement of program semantics. However, there is relatively little effort on enforcing appropriate controls to security-relevant non-control data. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop a practical and efficient software solution that can protect applications against non-control-data attacks. To address this need, IAI proposes to develop DFSI, a novel and practical two-layer security defense to protect programs against non-control-data attacks. Specifically, the DFSI separates the data flows of a program at a coarse-grained level, and enforces the fine-grained data-flow integrity to prevent the exploits of memory vulnerabilities with low performance overhead. DFSI techniques do not require the source code and can be applied to software binaries that have already been deployed on commodity systems.