PMU-extended Hardware ROP Attack Detection

Abstract

Return Oriented Programming is one of the major challenges for software security nowadays. It can bypass Data Execution Prevention (DEP) mechanism by chaining short instruction sequences from existing code together to induce arbitrary code execution. Existing defenses are usually trade-offs between practicality, security, and performance. In this paper, we propose PMUe, a low-cost hardware ROP detection approach that detects ROP attack based on three inherent properties of ROP. It is transparent to user applications and can be regarded as a small extension to existing Performance Monitoring Unit in commodity processors. Our evaluation demonstrates that PMUe can effectively detect ROP attack with negligible performance overhead.