ShrinkWrap: VTable protection without loose ends

Istvan Haller, Enes Göktąs, Elias Athanasopoulos, Georgios Portokalidis, Herbert Bos

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

30 Scopus citations

Abstract

As VTable hijacking becomes the primary mode of exploitation against modern browsers, protecting said VTables has recently become a prime research interest. While multiple source- And binary-based solutions for protecting VTables have been proposed already, we found that in practice they are too conservative, which allows determined attackers to circumvent them. In this paper we delve into the design of C++ VTables and match that knowledge against the now industry standard protection scheme of VTV. We propose an end-to-end design that significantly refines VTV, to offer a provably optimal protection scheme. As we build on top of VTV, we preserve all of its advantages in terms of software compatibility and overhead. Thus, our proposed design comes "for free" for any user today. Besides the design we propose a testing methodology, which can be used by future developers to validate their implementations. We evaluated our protection scheme on Google Chrome and show that no compatibility issues were introduced, while overhead is also unchanged compared to the baseline of VTV.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2015
Pages341-350
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450336826
DOIs
StatePublished - 7 Dec 2015
Event31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2015 - Los Angeles, United States
Duration: 7 Dec 201511 Dec 2015

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series
Volume7-11-December-2015

Conference

Conference31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLos Angeles
Period7/12/1511/12/15

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