Marlin: Mitigating Code Reuse Attacks Using Code Randomization

PROJECT TITLE :

Marlin: Mitigating Code Reuse Attacks Using Code Randomization

ABSTRACT:

Code-reuse attacks, like return-oriented programming (ROP), are a class of buffer overflow attacks that repurpose existing executable code towards malicious purposes. These attacks bypass defenses against code injection attacks by chaining along sequence of directions, commonly referred to as gadgets, to execute the desired attack logic. A common feature of those attacks is the reliance on the data of memory layout of the executable code. We tend to propose a fine grained randomization based approach that breaks these assumptions by modifying the layout of the executable code and hinders code-reuse attack. Our answer, Marlin, randomizes the inner structure of the executable code by randomly shuffling the perform blocks in the target binary. This denies the attacker the required a priori data of instruction addresses for constructing the specified exploit payload. Our approach can be applied to any ELF binary and every execution of this binary uses a completely different randomization. We tend to have integrated Marlin into the bash shell that randomizes the target executable before launching it. Our work shows that such an approach incurs low overhead and considerably increases the extent of security against code-reuse based attacks.

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