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.

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Jiayi Lin (The University of Hong Kong), Qingyu Zhang (The University of Hong Kong), Junzhe Li (The University of Hong Kong), Chenxin Sun (The University of Hong Kong), Hao Zhou (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Changhua Luo (The University of Hong Kong), Chenxiong Qian (The University of Hong Kong)

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Wenhao Wang (Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, Institute of Information Engineering, CAS), Linke Song (Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, Institute of Information Engineering, CAS), Benshan Mei (Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, Institute of Information Engineering, CAS), Shuang Liu (Ant Group), Shijun Zhao (Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, Institute of Information Engineering,…

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Philipp Mackensen (Ruhr University Bochum), Paul Staat (Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy), Stefan Roth (Ruhr University Bochum), Aydin Sezgin (Ruhr University Bochum), Christof Paar (Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy), Veelasha Moonsamy (Ruhr University Bochum)

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