Samuel Mergendahl (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Nathan Burow (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Hamed Okhravi (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)

Memory corruption attacks against unsafe programming languages like C/C++ have been a major threat to computer systems for multiple decades. Various sanitizers and runtime exploit mitigation techniques have been shown to only provide partial protection at best. Recently developed ‘safe’ programming languages such as Rust and Go hold the promise to change this paradigm by preventing memory corruption bugs using a strong type system and proper compile-time and runtime checks. Gradual deployment of these languages has been touted as a way of improving the security of existing applications before entire applications can be developed in safe languages. This is notable in popular applications such as Firefox and Tor. In this paper, we systematically analyze the security of multi-language applications. We show that because language safety checks in safe languages and exploit mitigation techniques applied to unsafe languages (e.g., Control-Flow Integrity) break different stages of an exploit to prevent control hijacking attacks, an attacker can carefully maneuver between the languages to mount a successful attack. In essence, we illustrate that the incompatible set of assumptions made in various languages enables attacks that are not possible in each language alone. We study different variants of these attacks and analyze Firefox to illustrate the feasibility and extent of this problem. Our findings show that gradual deployment of safe programming languages, if not done with extreme care, can indeed be detrimental to security.

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MobFuzz: Adaptive Multi-objective Optimization in Gray-box Fuzzing

Gen Zhang (National University of Defense Technology), Pengfei Wang (National University of Defense Technology), Tai Yue (National University of Defense Technology), Xiangdong Kong (National University of Defense Technology), Shan Huang (National University of Defense Technology), Xu Zhou (National University of Defense Technology), Kai Lu (National University of Defense Technology)

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The Inconvenient Truths of Ground Truth for Binary Analysis

Jim Alves-Foss, Varsha Venugopal (University of Idaho)

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Shaduf: Non-Cycle Payment Channel Rebalancing

Zhonghui Ge (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Yi Zhang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Yu Long (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Dawu Gu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

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Packet-Level Open-World App Fingerprinting on Wireless Traffic

Jianfeng Li (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Shuohan Wu (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Hao Zhou (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Xiapu Luo (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Ting Wang (Penn State), Yangyang Liu (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Xiaobo Ma (Xi'an Jiaotong University)

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