Shixin Song (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Joseph Zhang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Mengjia Yan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is one of the most prominently deployed mitigations against memory corruption attacks. ASLR randomly shuffles program virtual addresses to prevent attackers from knowing the location of program contents in memory. Microarchitectural side channels have been shown to defeat ASLR through various hardware mechanisms. We systematically analyze existing microarchitectural attacks and identify multiple leakage paths. Given the vast attack surface exposed by ASLR, it is challenging to effectively prevent leaking the ASLR secret against microarchitectural attacks.

Motivated by this, we present Oreo, a software-hardware co-design mitigation that strengthens ASLR against these attacks. Oreo uses a new memory mapping interface to remove secret randomized bits in virtual addresses before translating them to their corresponding physical addresses. This extra step hides randomized virtual addresses from microarchitecture structures, preventing side channels from leaking ASLR secrets. Oreo is transparent to user programs and incurs low overhead. We prototyped and evaluated our design on Linux using the hardware simulator gem5.

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Marzieh Bitaab (Arizona State University), Alireza Karimi (Arizona State University), Zhuoer Lyu (Arizona State University), Adam Oest (Amazon), Dhruv Kuchhal (Amazon), Muhammad Saad (X Corp.), Gail-Joon Ahn (Arizona State University), Ruoyu Wang (Arizona State University), Tiffany Bao (Arizona State University), Yan Shoshitaishvili (Arizona State University), Adam Doupé (Arizona State University)

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Magdalena Pasternak (University of Florida), Kevin Warren (University of Florida), Daniel Olszewski (University of Florida), Susan Nittrouer (University of Florida), Patrick Traynor (University of Florida), Kevin Butler (University of Florida)

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Qihang Zhou (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Wenzhuo Cao (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyberspace Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xiaoqi Jia (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Peng Liu (The Pennsylvania State University, USA), Shengzhi Zhang (Department of Computer Science, Metropolitan College,…

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Roee Idan, Roy Peled, Aviel Ben Siman Tov, Eli Markus, Boris Zadov, Ofir Chodeda, Yohai Fadida (Ben Gurion University of the Negev), Oliver Holschke, Jan Plachy (T-Labs (Research & Innovation)), Yuval Elovici, Asaf Shabtai (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)

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