SafeStack: Automatically Patching Stack- Based Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities

SafeStack: Automatically Patching Stack- Based Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities

Abstract— Buffer overflow attacks still pose a significant threat to the security and availability of today’s computer systems. Although there are a number of solutions proposed to provide adequate protection against buffer overflow attacks, most of existing solutions terminate the vulnerable program when the buffer overflow occurs, effectively rendering the program unavailable. < Final Year Project > The impact on availability is a serious problem on service-oriented platforms. This paper presents SafeStack, a system that can automatically diagnose and patch stack-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities. The key technique of our solution is to virtualize memory accesses and move the vulnerable buffer into protected memory regions, which provides a fundamental and effective protection against recurrence of the same attack without stopping normal system execution. We developed a prototype on a Linux system, and conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of the system using a range of applications. Our experimental results showed that SafeStack can quickly generate runtime patches to successfully handle the attack’s recurrence. Furthermore, SafeStack only incurs acceptable overhead for the patched applications.