Despite extensive research over the last two decades, control-flow (or runtime) attacks on software are still prevalent. Recently, smart-phones, of which millions are in use today, have become an attractive target for adversaries. However, existing solutions are either ad-hoc or limited in their effectiveness.In this paper, we present a general countermeasure against control-flow attacks on smartphone platforms. Our approach makes use of control-flow integrity(CFI), and tackles unique challenges of the ARM architecture and smartphone platforms (e.g., application encryption and signing,closed-source OS). Our framework and implementation is efficient, since it requires no access to source code, performs CFI enforcement on-the-fly during runtime, and is compatible to memory randomization (e.g.,ASLR) and code signing/encryption. We chose Apple iPhone for our reference implementation, because it has become an attractive target for control-flow attacks due to its wide spread deployment of native code.Our performance evaluation on a real iOS device demonstrates that our implementation does not induce any notable overhead when applied to popular iOS applications.
%0 Conference Paper
%1 TUD-CS-2011-0281
%A Davi, Lucas
%A Dmitrienko, Alexandra
%A Egele, Manuel
%A Fischer, Thomas
%A Holz, Thorsten
%A Hund, Ralf
%A Nürnberger, Stefan
%A Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza
%B International Workshop on Trustworthy Embedded Devices (TrustED)
%D 2011
%K International-Conference-Workshop-Papers-Book-Chapters myown
%T CFI Goes Mobile: Control-Flow Integrity for Smartphones
%X Despite extensive research over the last two decades, control-flow (or runtime) attacks on software are still prevalent. Recently, smart-phones, of which millions are in use today, have become an attractive target for adversaries. However, existing solutions are either ad-hoc or limited in their effectiveness.In this paper, we present a general countermeasure against control-flow attacks on smartphone platforms. Our approach makes use of control-flow integrity(CFI), and tackles unique challenges of the ARM architecture and smartphone platforms (e.g., application encryption and signing,closed-source OS). Our framework and implementation is efficient, since it requires no access to source code, performs CFI enforcement on-the-fly during runtime, and is compatible to memory randomization (e.g.,ASLR) and code signing/encryption. We chose Apple iPhone for our reference implementation, because it has become an attractive target for control-flow attacks due to its wide spread deployment of native code.Our performance evaluation on a real iOS device demonstrates that our implementation does not induce any notable overhead when applied to popular iOS applications.
@inproceedings{TUD-CS-2011-0281,
abstract = {Despite extensive research over the last two decades, control-flow (or runtime) attacks on software are still prevalent. Recently, smart-phones, of which millions are in use today, have become an attractive target for adversaries. However, existing solutions are either ad-hoc or limited in their effectiveness.In this paper, we present a general countermeasure against control-flow attacks on smartphone platforms. Our approach makes use of control-flow integrity(CFI), and tackles unique challenges of the ARM architecture and smartphone platforms (e.g., application encryption and signing,closed-source OS). Our framework and implementation is efficient, since it requires no access to source code, performs CFI enforcement on-the-fly during runtime, and is compatible to memory randomization (e.g.,ASLR) and code signing/encryption. We chose Apple iPhone for our reference implementation, because it has become an attractive target for control-flow attacks due to its wide spread deployment of native code.Our performance evaluation on a real iOS device demonstrates that our implementation does not induce any notable overhead when applied to popular iOS applications.},
added-at = {2020-05-03T20:09:10.000+0200},
author = {Davi, Lucas and Dmitrienko, Alexandra and Egele, Manuel and Fischer, Thomas and Holz, Thorsten and Hund, Ralf and Nürnberger, Stefan and Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/273d724776c32cacdd6671e2c0ca17a7c/sssgroup},
booktitle = {International Workshop on Trustworthy Embedded Devices (TrustED)},
interhash = {b799cc9aff14aafec678e849ecdf5455},
intrahash = {73d724776c32cacdd6671e2c0ca17a7c},
keywords = {International-Conference-Workshop-Papers-Book-Chapters myown},
location = {Leuven, Belgium},
month = {September},
pdf = {https://se2.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/publications/download/paper/1522.pdf},
timestamp = {2022-12-20T00:29:26.000+0100},
title = {CFI Goes Mobile: Control-Flow Integrity for Smartphones},
venue = {TrustED},
year = 2011
}