2019/09/09 by Marie-Therese Walter, David Pfaff, Walter, Marie-Therese +5
Computer Science · Materials Science · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Diamond and Carbon-based Materials Research #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Security and Verification in Computing
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1909.03758
openalex publication_date 2019/09/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Memory corruption vulnerabilities often enable attackers to take control of a target system by overwriting control-flow relevant data (such as return addresses and function pointers), which are potentially stored in close proximity of related, typically user-controlled data on the stack. In this paper, we propose ProConDa, a general approach for protecting control-flow relevant data on the stack ProConDa leverages hardware features to enforce a strict separation between control-flow relevant and regular data of programs written in non-memory-safe languages such as C. Contrary to related approaches, ProConDa does not rely on information hiding and is therefore not susceptible to several recent attacks specifically targeting information hiding as a foundation for memory isolation. We show that ProConDa enforcement is compatible with existing software by applying a software-based prototype to industry benchmarks on an ARM CPU running Linux.