Reminder: Practice Talk 4pm 2310cs

[Suan Yong <suan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm giving a practice talk at 4pm; cookies will be provided.

Suan


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 >
 >Protecting C Programs from Attacks via Invalid Pointer Dereferences
 >
 >Writes via unchecked pointer dereferences rank high among vulnerabilities
 >most often exploited by malicious code.  The most common attacks use an
 >unchecked string copy to cause a buffer overrun, thereby overwriting the
 >return address in the function's activation record.  Then, when the
 >function returns, control is actually transferred to the attacker's code.
 >Other attacks may overwrite function pointers, setjmp buffers, system-call
 >arguments, or simply corrupt data to cause a denial of service.
 >
 >A number of techniques have been proposed to address such attacks.  Some
 >are limited to protecting the return address only; others are more
 >general, but have undesirable properties such as having a high runtime
 >overhead, requiring manual changes to the source code, or forcing
 >programmers to give up control of data representations and memory
 >management.
 >
 >This talk describes the design and implementation of a security tool for C
 >programs that addresses all these issues: it has a low runtime overhead,
 >does not require source code modification by the programmer, does not
 >report false positives, and provides protection against a wide range of
 >attacks via bad pointer dereferences, including but not limited to buffer
 >overruns and attempts to access previously freed memory.  The tool uses
 >static analysis to identify potentially dangerous pointer dereferences,
 >and memory locations that are legitimate targets of these pointers.
 >Dynamic checks are then inserted; if at runtime the target of an unsafe
 >dereference is not in the legitimate set, a potential security violation
 >is reported, and the program is halted.
 >
 >