Zhanpeng Liu (Peking University), Yi Rong (Tsinghua University), Chenyang Li (Peking University), Wende Tan (Tsinghua University), Yuan Li (Zhongguancun Laboratory), Xinhui Han (Peking University), Songtao Yang (Zhongguancun Laboratory), Chao Zhang (Tsinghua University)

Memory safety violations are a significant concern in real-world programs, prompting the development of various mitigation methods. However, existing cost-efficient defenses provide limited protection and can be bypassed by sophisticated attacks, necessitating the combination of multiple defenses. Unfortunately, combining these defenses often results in performance degradation and compatibility issues.

We present CCTAG, a lightweight architecture that simplifies the integration of diverse tag-based defense mechanisms. It offers configurable tag verification and modification rules to build various security policies, acting as basic protection primitives for defense applications. Its policy-centric mask design boosts flexibility and prevents conflicts, enabling multiple defense mechanisms to run concurrently. Our RISC-V prototype on an FPGA board demonstrates that CCTAG incurs minimal hardware overhead, with a slight increase in LUTs (6.77%) and FFs (8.02%). With combined protections including ret address protection, code pointer and vtable pointer integrity, and memory coloring, the SPEC CPU CINT2006 and CINT2017 benchmarks report low runtime overheads of 4.71% and 7.93%, respectively. Security assessments with CVEs covering major memory safety vulnerabilities and various exploitation techniques verify CCTAG’s effectiveness in mitigating real-world threats.

View More Papers

AlphaDog: No-Box Camouflage Attacks via Alpha Channel Oversight

Qi Xia (University of Texas at San Antonio), Qian Chen (University of Texas at San Antonio)

Read More

A New PPML Paradigm for Quantized Models

Tianpei Lu (The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University), Bingsheng Zhang (The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University), Xiaoyuan Zhang (The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University), Kui Ren (The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University)

Read More

Blackbox Fuzzing of Distributed Systems with Multi-Dimensional Inputs and...

Yonghao Zou (Beihang University and Peking University), Jia-Ju Bai (Beihang University), Zu-Ming Jiang (ETH Zurich), Ming Zhao (Arizona State University), Diyu Zhou (Peking University)

Read More

Horcrux: Synthesize, Split, Shift and Stay Alive; Preventing Channel...

Anqi Tian (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Peifang Ni (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Zhongguancun Laboratory, Beijing, P.R.China), Yingzi Gao (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Jing Xu (Institute of Software, Chinese…

Read More