SecretSafe: A Lightweight Approach against Heap Buffer Over-Read Attack

  • Xiaoguang Wang
  • , Yong Qi
  • , Chi Zhang
  • , Saiyu Qi
  • , Peijian Wang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Software memory disclosure attacks, such as buffer over-read, often work quietly and would cause secret data leakage. The well-known OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability leaked out millions of servers' private keys, which caused most of the Internet services insecure at that time. Existing solutions are either hard to apply to large code bases (e.g., through formal verification [20] or symbolic execution [8] on program code), or too heavyweight (e.g., by involving a hypervisor software [23], [24] or a modified operating system kernel [17]). In this paper, we propose SecretSafe, a lightweight and easy-to-use system which leverages the traditional x86 segmentation mechanism to isolate the application secrets from the remaining data. Software developers could prevent the secrets from being leaked out by simply declaring the secret variables with SECURE keyword. Our customized compiler will automatically separate the secrets from the remaining non-secret data with an isolated memory segment. Any legal instructions that have to access the secrets will be automatically instrumented to enable accesses to the isolated segment. We have implemented a SecretSafe prototype with the open source LLVM compiler framework. The evaluation shows that SecretSafe is both secure and efficient.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2017 IEEE 41st Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2017
EditorsClaudio Demartini, Thomas Conte, Motonori Nakamura, Chung-Horng Lung, Zhiyong Zhang, Kamrul Hasan, Sorel Reisman, Ling Liu, William Claycomb, Hiroki Takakura, Ji-Jiang Yang, Edmundo Tovar, Stelvio Cimato, Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, Toyokazu Akiyama
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages628-636
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781538603673
DOIs
StatePublished - 7 Sep 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event41st IEEE Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2017 - Torino, Italy
Duration: 4 Jul 20178 Jul 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Computer Software and Applications Conference
Volume1
ISSN (Print)0730-3157

Conference

Conference41st IEEE Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2017
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityTorino
Period4/07/178/07/17

Keywords

  • Buffer over-read attack
  • memory segmentation
  • vulnerability elimination

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