Return-Oriented Programming: Systems, Languages,and Applications

摘要

We introduce return-oriented programming, a technique by which an attacker can induce arbitrary behavior in a program whose control flow he has diverted, without injecting any code. A return-oriented program chains together short instruction sequences already present in a program's address space, each of which ends in a "return" instruction. Return-oriented programming defeats the W©X protections recently deployed by Microsoft, Intel, and AMD; in this context, it can be seen as a generalization of traditional return-into-libc attacks. But the threat is more general. Return-oriented programming is readily exploitable on multiple architectures and systems. It also bypasses an entire category of security measures—those that seek to prevent malicious computation by preventing the execution of malicious code. To demonstrate the wide applicability of return-oriented programming, we construct a Turing-complete set of building blocks called gadgets using the standard C libraries of two very different architectures: Linux/x86 and Solaris/SPARC. To demonstrate the power of return-oriented programming, we present a high-level, general-purpose language for describing return-oriented exploits and a compiler that translates it to gadgets.