Enhancing Security Check in Visual Studio C/C++ Compiler

Abstract

Buffer overflow exploitation is a major threat to software security. To reduce the threat, Visual studio C/C++compiler enables to randomize the addresses of the compiled program in initialization time, and to embed security stack guards by the compiled program in run time. The present paper upgrades the compiler by increasing the compiled program's capabilities in the following aspects: (1) protects a frame pointer from callee's tampering with at no additional cost; (2) defeats the attack which tampers 1-2 bytes of a protected region at a very low cost; (3) checks the indirect function call against the prologue pattern so as to reduce the probability of software crash in case of being attacked. Our experiments demonstrate the improvement on Microsoft Visual Studio in generating secure and robust software.