SMOV: protecting programs against buffer overflow in hardware

• Ano de defesa: 2015
• Autor(a) principal: Antonio Lemos Maia Neto
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; UFMG
• Palavras-chave em Português: Buffer-overflow; Security; Computer Architectures; Computação; Computadores Medidas de segurança; Redes de computadores Medidas de segurança
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/ESBF-9WVNB8

A Buffer Overflow (BOF) continues to be among the top causes of software vulnerabilities. Last year the security world was taken by surprise when researches unveiled a BOF in OpenSSL. Languages like C and C++, widely used for systems development and for a large variety of applications, do not provide native Array-Bound Checks (ABC). A myriadof proposals endeavor memory protection for such languages by employing both softwareand hardware-based solutions. Due to numerous reasons, none of them have yet reached the mainstream. In this work, we propose a novel approach to achieve an arrays bound-check and a memory access (when allowed) within a single instruction. We discuss how it can be implemented on variable-length ISAs and provide a reference implementation.