[ACM Press the 1st EuroSys Workshop - Nuremberg, Germany (2009.03.31-2009.03.31)] Proceedings of the 1st EuroSys Workshop on Virtualization Technology for Dependable Systems - VDTS '09 - Instruction-level countermeasures against stack-based buffer overflow attacks

✍ Scribed by Gadaleta, Francesco; Younan, Yves; Jacobs, Bart; Joosen, Wouter; De Neve, Erik; Beosier, Nils

• Book ID: 121377645
• Publisher: ACM Press
• Year: 2009
• Weight: 158 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 1605584738
• DOI: 10.1145/1518684.1518686

✦ Synopsis

In this paper, we examine the possibility of using virtualization to implement a countermeasure that protects against buffer overflow attacks. The countermeasure works by adding a few extra instructions to the architecture that are emulated by the hypervisor. After running performance benchmarks, a high overhead was observed. Our proofof-concept software implementation illustrates that the proposed approach is feasible and that the hardware implementation confirms a negligible overhead.