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3  Effectiveness



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Figure 4: Format of an attack which uses a large buffer overflow to increase the odds of success.


Address obfuscation is not a bulletproof defense against all memory error exploits, but is instead a probabilistic technique which increases the amount of work required before an attack (or sequence of attacks) succeeds. Hence, it is critical to have an estimate of the increase in attacker work load. In this section, we first analyze the effectiveness of address obfuscation against previously reported attacks and attack variations (``classic'' attacks). Then we discuss attacks that can be specifically crafted to exploit weaknesses of address obfuscation.

3.1  Classic Attacks

Address obfuscation provides good protection against the majority of the ``classic'' attacks. Most of these attacks involve overwriting of a single pointer or datum without any ability to read the memory contents before attacking. Against address obfuscation, an attacker is forced to make guesses about the address of one or more program values in order to succeed.

3.1.1  Stack Smashing Attacks

A classic stack-smashing attack is absolute address-dependent, since the absolute address of the injected code must be placed in the return address stored in the stack frame. Let N be the size of the virtual address space available for the initial random stack offset, and assume that the stack offset is chosen randomly from { 0 ... N-1 } (with a uniform distribution). Furthermore, we don't wish to allow an offset of zero, and Linux requires that the stack pointer be a 32-bit word-aligned address, which reduces the set of possible offsets to { 4, 8, ... N }. (In this analysis, we assume that the one-time offset N is much larger than the effect of stack-frame padding, and hence ignore the latter. The purpose of stack-frame padding is to introduce significant additional randomization into the addresses so that attacks become difficult even if an attacker has somehow learned the value of N.)

Assuming the attacker knows the value of N, the attacker can guess an address randomly and have a 4/N chance of success. Moreover, if the guess happens to be wrong, then the program will likely crash, and will have to be restarted. At this time, a new random value for stack offset will be generated, which means that each failure does not provide any information to the attacker. Thus, the probability of a successful attack after k attempts is given by 1-(1-4/N)k. From this, it can be shown that the probability of success approaches 0.5 after about N/8 attempts.

The attacker can improve the odds of success by increasing the size of the attack data. This can be done by writing to the buffer a block containing copies of a guessed address G (enough copies to be relatively sure that the return address is overwritten --- in our implementation, of the order of 256 copies), followed by a block of K NOPs, and then the attack code. As long as G falls somewhere in the block of NOPs (or directly equals the first instruction of the inject code), the attack will succeed. This is illustrated in Figure 4, which shows the overlap between the stack values (along the top), and the attack data (along the bottom). When the current function returns, execution will jump to the guessed address G, which the attacker hopes will be within the range of the NOPs or the first instruction of the injected code.

The insertion of K NOPs increases the odds of success by a factor of K to 4 · K/N, reducing the average number of attempts for a reasonable chance of success to roughly N/8 · K. Fortunately, K is limited in size because the attacker must avoid writing to the read-only stack padding. If the overflow runs into the read-only region, a segmentation fault will occur, preventing the attack from succeeding. This restricts the value of K to be much smaller than N. C programs tend not to use too much stack space; in the example programs of Figure 5, the amount of average stack storage allocated ranged from 1 to 4 kilobytes. For such programs, the maximum ratio of N to K will be 2.5 · 104, and the odds of a single attack succeeding will be 4/2.5 · 104, resulting in about 3000 attempts, or 12 megabytes of data transmitted, for a reasonable (approx 0.5) probability of success. While this may seem like a small number, note that:

3.1.2  Existing code attacks

Existing code attacks, also called return-into-libc attacks, typically involve overwriting the return address on the stack with the address of existing code, typically a function in the standard C-library, such as execve. The arguments to this function will be taken from the stack, which has been overwritten by the same buffer overflow to contain the data chosen by attacker. In order for such an attack to succeed, the attacker needs to guess the location of the vulnerable function. With a randomization of the order of 100MB, and given the constraint that the base addresses of libraries and the executable must start at a multiple of page size (4KB), the probability of success is of the order of 4 · 10-5.

Attacks that corrupt other stack-resident function pointers are all similar to an existing code attack, and the probability of a successful attack remains the same as with existing code attacks.

3.1.3  Format-String Attacks

A format-string vulnerability [33] occurs whenever a program contains a call to the printf family of functions with a first parameter (format string) that is provided by an attacker. Since the format string provides a great deal of control over the behavior of printf function, the ability of an attacker to provide a format string can be likened to the ability to execute attacker-chosen code. For this reason, most techniques developed to deal with buffer overflows are not effective against format string attacks.

The common form of this attack uses the somewhat obscure %n format parameter, which takes a pointer to an integer as an argument, and writes the number of bytes printed so far to the location given by the argument. The number of bytes printed can be easily controlled by printing an integer with a large amount of padding, e.g., %432d. The printf function assumes that the address to write into is provided as an argument, i.e., it is to be taken from the stack. If the attacker-provided format string is stored on the stack, and if printf can be tricked into extracting arguments from this portion of the stack, then it is possible for an attacker to overwrite an arbitrary, attacker-specified location in memory with attacker-specified data. Such an attack can be used to change return values without trampling over canary values used by StackGuard and other approaches.

The format-string attack described above is an absolute-address dependent attack. It requires the attacker to know the absolute location where the return address is stored on the stack, and the absolute location where the attack code is present. This means that the probability of a successful attack using this approach cannot be any larger than that for stack-smashing attacks.

Certain kinds of format-string vulnerabilities can be exploited to read stack contents. In particular, if the vulnerable printf (or variant) call is one that sends its output to the attacker, then the attacker can potentially learn the randomizations used in the program, and use this knowledge to craft a successful attack. (See Section 3.2.1 for details.)

3.1.4  Data Modification Attacks

Attacks which target non-pointer data values are one of the most difficult to defend against. For instance, a string which contains a shell command may be stored adjacently to the end of a buffer with an overflow vulnerability. In this case, an attacker can overflow the buffer with ASCII text containing a different command to be executed. The success of the attack depends only upon the relative distance between the buffer and the command string. Furthermore, even if the relative distance is randomized, the attacker can use blank characters as padding to increase the odds of success. If the attacker pads the injected string with more blanks than the maximum increase in distance between the buffer and the shell string, then the odds of success are high, especially when the data is located in the static area. If it is located on the stack, then the introduction of blanks (or other padding characters) may corrupt critical data on the stack, which may cause the program to crash. For this reason, such padding may not be very successful for stack-resident data.

Our current implementation provides limited protection against this attack, in the case where the data resides on the stack or heap. In the case of heap, if the overflow attack overwrites critical data within the same malloc-ed block as the target of the copy operation, then randomization does not help. Otherwise malloc randomization is effective, with the effectiveness increasing proportionately with the number of malloc blocks that are overwritten by the attack. Similarly, if the buffer and vulnerable data appear on the same stack frame, our current implementation does not provide any help. However, if they reside in different stack frames, then some level of protection is available, depending on the distance between the buffer and the vulnerable data.

The scope of protection can be expanded using the technique presented in [16], where all of the sensitive data (such as function and data pointers) can be located at addresses below the starting address of any buffer. Since the overflows can only move upward in memory, they can never reach from the buffer to a sensitive data location without crossing over into previous stack frames, in which case the return address will be corrupted.

Our current implementation provides no protection against relative address-dependent overflows that corrupt data in the static area. A fuller implementation of address obfuscation, which includes reordering of static variables as well as padding between them, will indeed provide a good degree of protection against data modification attacks in the static area.

3.1.5  Heap Overflow and Double-Free Attacks

Due to the lack of adequate checking done by malloc on the validity of blocks being freed, code which frees the same block twice corrupts the list of free blocks maintained by malloc. This corruption can be exploited to overwrite an arbitrary word of memory with an arbitrary value [2]. A heap overflow attack achieves the same effect through a buffer overflow that also corrupts the data structures maintained by malloc [23].

Both of these are absolute address-dependent attacks, and the protection provided by address obfuscation is quite good, as the address of a single word is randomized over 108/4 possible values.

3.1.6  Integer Overflow Attacks

Integer overflow attacks exploit an integer overflow to bypass runtime checks in a program. Since an integer has a fixed size, an overflow during a computation causes it to change its value in an undefined manner (typically, the value ``wraps around'' from a large positive value to a small negative one, or vice-versa). Due to the wrap-around, boolean conditions which test the values of integers resulting from arithmetic overflow are often incorrectly evaluated. For example, if i is sufficiently large, the expression i+5 can overflow, resulting in a negative value, and causing the condition i+5 > limit to evaluate to false, when it should be true. This effectively disables the bounds checking, allowing an overflow attack to be performed in spite of the bounds checking.

The level of protection provided by address obfuscation from these kinds of attack is the same as for normal buffer overflow attacks. In particular, if the target corrupted by an attack is a pointer, then the probability of a successful attack is low. This was the case with the recent Snort integer overflow vulnerability. If the attack targets security critical data, then the protection is similar to that for relative address attacks. In particular, a good degree of protection is available for heap-resident data, while the level of protection for stack resident data is some what lesser. As an example, the sshd integer overflow attack involved overwriting a critical piece of string data with a null character, which was interpreted by the sshd server to mean that no password was required for a user to log in. Address obfuscation provides a good degree of protection against such an attack, while some of the related approaches such as PointGuard can be defeated by this attack.

3.2  Specifically Crafted Attacks

We have identified three specific attacks which can be used to attempt to defeat address obfuscation when the victim program contains the ``right'' vulnerability. These occur when (1) a program has a bug which allows an attacker to read the memory contents, or (2) an overflow exists that can be used to modify two pointer values (a buffer pointer and a function pointer), or (3) an overflow can be used to overwrite just the lower part of a pointer. In the case of (1), the attacker can craft an attack that succeeds deterministically. In the case of (2) and (3), the probability of success is significantly higher than the classic attacks, but far from deterministic.

We note all of the attacks discussed in this section require vulnerabilities that are very uncommon. Moreover, although our current implementation is vulnerable to these attacks, a full implementation of address obfuscation, employing all of the transformations described in Section 2.1, and using dynamically changing random values, will be much less vulnerable.

3.2.1  Read/Write Attacks

If a program contains a bug which allows an attacker to print the values stored in arbitrary memory locations, then most of the existing security schemes can be compromised if there is a vulnerability somewhere in the program. In the case of address obfuscation, the attacker can compare pointer values stored in the program against a local, non-obfuscated copy, and possibly decipher the obfuscation mapping. A specific instance of this occurs when an attacker can control the format-string passed to a printf, provided the vulnerable print statement sends its output to the attacker [29]. Given such a vulnerability, an attacker can send a format string that would cause the stack contents to be printed. From the output, the attacker can guess with a high probability (or with certainty, if no stack frame padding is used) the locations holding saved frame pointer and return address. By comparing these values with those that can be observed on their local version of the vulnerable program that has not been obfuscated, the attacker can identify the obfuscation mapping. Armed with this mapping, the attacker can develop an attack that will succeed with a high probability. This time, the attacker will use the standard format-string attack that uses the n% directive.

We point out that changing just the base addresses of different memory regions, as done with PaX ASLR, does not help with this attack. Most other techniques, such as PointGuard and StackGuard are also vulnerable to this attack. In the case of PointGuard, the obfuscated stack can be compared to a non obfuscated process, and the xor mask value can be inferred. In the case of StackGuard, the stack can be examined to determine the canary value, and then stack smashing can be used.

Address obfuscation, as implemented now, seems to provide some additional protection over ASLR: it is no longer possible to deterministically identify the location of frame pointer or return address. But this added difficulty does not translate into additional protection: the format-string based read attack does not cause the program to crash, so the attacker can perform multiple attacks to read the stack multiple times until he/she can determine the frame pointer with certainty. However, if the stack-frame padding is varied continuously at runtime, then address obfuscation will provide significant degree of protection. In this case, the location of the buffer, the saved frame pointer, as well as the return address, will change between the time the attacker read the contents of the stack and the time he/she tries to modify the return address. This will significantly decrease the chances of a successful attack. Probability of a successful existing-code attack can also be decreased significantly by using the more general form of address obfuscation of code, which involves reordering routines, etc.

3.2.2  Double Pointer Attacks

A program which contains a both a (preferably stack-allocated) pointer to a buffer and a buffer overflow vulnerability can be exploited to work around obfuscation. For example, consider the following code fragment, which is similar to one suggested for defeating StackGuard [7]:
void
f(char *user_input1, char *user_input2) {
  char *buf1 = malloc(100);
  char buf2[100];
  strcpy(buf2, user_input1);
  strncpy(buf1, user_input2, 100);
  ...
The steps required to exploit this code are as follows. First, the attacker can guess an address G likely to be valid (somewhere in the heap is a good choice). Second, the first strcpy to buf2 can be overflowed to overwrite the the top stack locations with G, setting both buf1 and the saved return address to equal G. Once this is done, the strcpy to buf1 will copy user_input2 to G. user_input2 should contain the injected code. When the function returns, it will jump to address G, which is the start of the code injected via user_input2.

The probability of success with this attack is proportional to the probability of guessing a valid address G in memory. This probability is small for programs that use small amounts of memory as compared to the amount of randomization. For instance, if the program uses a megabyte of memory, then the probability success (with a 100MB padding) is one in a hundred. The same line of reasoning holds with PointGuard: the attacker can overwrite buf1 and the return address with G, but these values will be interpreted as G   xor   M where M is the xor mask used by PointGuard to encrypt pointers. This means that the probability of success is proportional to that of guessing a G such that G   xor   M corresponds to a writable portion of the memory. This probability is given by (size of data memory used by program)/(size of address space), a quantity that is smaller than the corresponding number for address obfuscation.

3.2.3  Partial Overwrite Attacks

A partial overwrite attack is an attack which overwrites only part of a targeted value. For example, under the x86 architecture, an overflow could overwrite just the least significant byte of the return address. (This is hard to achieve if the buffer overflow was the result of an unchecked strcpy or similar function, since the terminating null character would clobber the rest of the return address. Thus, we need a buffer overflow that does not involve strings.) Since the only transformation made to code addresses is that of changing the base address, and since the quantity of change is constrained to be a multiple of the page size (4096 bytes on Linux), the location pointed by the return address is predictable when we we change its last 8 bits.

If exploitable code (i.e., code that can be used as a target in the case of existing code attacks) can be found within 256 bytes of the return address of a function with buffer-overflow vulnerability, then this attack will work against address obfuscation. However, it is very unlikely that such exploitable code can be found, so the attack suggested in [3] is more elaborate. Specifically, the attack involves the use of a call to the printf function in the caller code that precedes the call to the function with buffer overflow vulnerability. The attack then modifies the return address so that a return goes to the instruction that calls printf. The argument of the vulnerable function, which was attacker-provided, now becomes the argument to printf. At this point, the attacker can print the contents of the stack and then proceed as with the case where a format string bug allowed the attacker to read the stack contents.

Note that the stack-frame padding significantly increases the difficulty of carrying out this attack. In particular, there is a significant level of uncertainty (of the order of 128 bytes) in the distance between the vulnerable buffer and the return address, which the attacker can overcome only through guessing. If additional code address obfuscation transformations are used, (for instance, reordering of routines or introducing gaps within routines) then the attack becomes even harder.


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