HardScope: Thwarting DOP with Hardware-assisted Run-time Scope Enforcement

Understand

Widespread use of memory unsafe programming languages (e.g., C and C++) leaves many systems vulnerable to memory corruption attacks.

• A variety of defenses have been proposed to mitigate attacks that exploit memory errors to hijack the control flow of the code at run-time, e.g., (fine-grained) randomization or Control Flow Integrity.
• However, recent work on data-oriented programming (DOP) demonstrated highly expressive (Turing-complete) attacks, even in the presence of these state-of-the-art defenses.
• Although multiple real-world DOP attacks have been demonstrated, no efficient defenses are yet available.