Code-Reuse Attack Detection Using Kullback-Leibler Divergence in IoT

Abstract

Code-reuse attacks are very dangerous in various systems. This is because they do not inject malicious codes into target systems, but reuse the instruction sequences in executable files or libraries of target systems. Moreover, code-reuse attacks could be more harmful to IoT systems in the sense that it may not be easy to devise efficient and effective mechanism for code-reuse attack detection in resource-restricted IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a detection scheme with using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to combat against code-reuse attacks in IoT. Specifically, we detect code-reuse attacks by calculating KL divergence between the probability distributions of the packets that generate from IoT devices and contain code region addresses in memory system and the probability distributions of the packets that come to IoT devices and contain code region addresses in memory system, checking if the computed KL divergence is abnormal.