Code-pointer integrity

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe code-pointer integrity (CPI), a new design point that guarantees the integrity of all code pointers in a program (e.g., function pointers, saved return addresses) and thereby prevents all control-flow hijack attacks that exploit memory corruption errors, including attacks that bypass control-flow integrity mechanisms, such as control-flow bending [Carlini et al. 2015e]. We also describe code-pointer separation (CPS), a relaxation of CPI with better performance properties. CPI and CPS offer substantially better security-to-overhead ratios than the state of the art, and they are practical (CPI and CPS were used to protect a complete FreeBSD system and over 100 packages like apache and postgresql), effective (prevented all attacks in the RIPE benchmark), and efficient: on SPEC CPU2006, CPS averages 1.2% overhead for C and 1.9% for C/C++, while CPI's overhead is 2.9% for C and 8.4% for C/C++. This chapter is organized as follows: we introduce the motivation and key ideas behind CPI and CPS (Section 4.1), describe related work (Section 4.2), introduce our threat model (Section 4.3), describe CPI and CPS design (Section 4.4), present the formal model of CPI (Section 4.5), describe an implementation of CPI (Section 4.6) and the experimental results (Section 4.7), and then conclude (Section 4.8).