Coarse-grained Dynamic Taint Analysis for Defeating Control and Non-control Data Attacks

Abstract: Memory corruption attacks remain the primary threat for computer security. Information flow tracking or taint analysis has been proven to be effective against most memory corruption attacks. However, there are two shortcomings with current taint analysis based techniques. First, these techniques cause application slowdown by about 76% thereby limiting their practicality. Second, these techniques cannot handle non-control data attacks i.e., attacks that do not overwrite control data such as return address, but instead overwrite critical application configuration data or user identity data. In this work, to address these problems, we describe a coarse-grained taint analysis technique that uses information flow tracking at the level of application data objects. We propagate a one-bit taint over each application object that is modified by untrusted data thereby reducing the taint management overhead considerably. We performed extensive experimental evaluation of our approach and show that it can detect all critical attacks such as buffer overflows, and format string attacks, including non-control data attacks. Unlike the currently known approaches that can detect such a wide range of attacks, our approach does not require the source code or any hardware extensions. Run-time performance overhead evaluation shows that, on an average, our approach causes application slowdown by only 37% which is an order of magnitude improvement over existing approaches. Finally, since our approach performs run-time binary instrumentation, it is easier to integrate it with existing applications and systems.