Multi-Architecture Binary Rewriter to Prevent ROP Arbitrary Code Execution

Sammanfattning: Despite the increasing attention to the topic of computer security, the amount of vulnerable software services is still high. The exploitation of a common vulnerability like memory management bugs brought to the development of an attack known as Return Oriented Programming (ROP). Such technique employs malicious memory injections to hijack the control flow of the targeted application and execute an arbitrary series of instructions. This thesis explores the design and implementation of a static binary rewriting tool able to instrument applications compiled for the Linux operating system in order to offer protection against ROP exploitation on x86 and ARM platforms. The instrumentation is achieved by extracting re-compilable assembler code from executable binary files which is then processed and modified. The effectiveness of such solution is tested with a selection of benchmarking utilities in order to evaluate the cost in terms of performance caused by its employment. The results obtained from these experiments show that on average the added overheads are acceptably low and, consequently, the proposed tool is a valid solution to improve the security of vulnerable applications when the original source code is not available.