The lower layers in the modern computing infrastructure are written in languages threatened by exploitation of memory management errors. Recently deployed exploit mitigations such as control-\ufb02ow integrity (CFI) can prevent traditional return-oriented programming (ROP) exploits but are much less effective against newer techniques such as Counterfeit Object-Oriented Programming (COOP) that execute a chain of C++ virtual methods. Since these methods are valid control-\ufb02ow targets, COOP attacks are hard to distinguish from benign computations. Code randomization is likewise ineffective against COOP. Until now, however, COOP attacks have been limited to vulnerable C++ applications which makes it unclear whether COOP is as general and portable a threat as ROP. This paper demonstrates the first COOP-style exploit for Objective-C, the predominant programming language on Apple\u2019s OS X and iOS platforms. We also retrofit the Objective-C runtime with the first practical and efficient defense against our novel attack. Our defense is able to protect complex, real-world software such as iTunes without recompilation. Our performance experiments show that the overhead of our defense is low in practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The lower layers in the modern computing infrastructure are written in languages threatened by exploitation of memory management errors. Recently deployed exploit mitigations such as control-\ufb02ow integrity (CFI) can prevent traditional return-oriented programming (ROP) exploits but are much less effective against newer techniques such as Counterfeit Object-Oriented Programming (COOP) that execute a chain of C++ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"USENIX Association","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 16)","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"2016 USENIX Annual 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