2,435 research outputs found
A model and framework for reliable build systems
Reliable and fast builds are essential for rapid turnaround during
development and testing. Popular existing build systems rely on correct manual
specification of build dependencies, which can lead to invalid build outputs
and nondeterminism. We outline the challenges of developing reliable build
systems and explore the design space for their implementation, with a focus on
non-distributed, incremental, parallel build systems. We define a general model
for resources accessed by build tasks and show its correspondence to the
implementation technique of minimum information libraries, APIs that return no
information that the application doesn't plan to use. We also summarize
preliminary experimental results from several prototype build managers
Link-time smart card code hardening
This paper presents a feasibility study to protect smart card software against fault-injection attacks by means of link-time code rewriting. This approach avoids the drawbacks of source code hardening, avoids the need for manual assembly writing, and is applicable in conjunction with closed third-party compilers. We implemented a range of cookbook code hardening recipes in a prototype link-time rewriter and evaluate their coverage and associated overhead to conclude that this approach is promising. We demonstrate that the overhead of using an automated link-time approach is not significantly higher than what can be obtained with compile-time hardening or with manual hardening of compiler-generated assembly code
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Heisenbyte: Thwarting Memory Disclosure Attacks using Destructive Code Reads
Vulnerabilities that disclose executable memory pages enable a new class of powerful code reuse attacks that build the attack payload at runtime. In this work, we present Heisenbyte, a system to protect against memory disclosure attacks. Central to Heisenbyte is the concept of destructive code reads – code is garbled right after it is read. Garbling the code after reading it takes away from the attacker her ability to leverage memory disclosure bugs in both static code and dynamically generated just-in-time code. By leveraging existing virtualization support, Heisenbyte’s novel use of destructive code reads sidesteps the problem of incomplete binary disassembly in binaries, and extends protection to close-sourced COTS binaries, which are two major limitations of prior solutions against memory disclosure vulnerabilities. Our experiments demonstrate that Heisenbyte can tolerate some degree of imperfect static analysis in disassembled binaries, while effectively thwarting dynamic code reuse exploits in both static and JIT code, at a modest 1.8% average runtime overhead due to virtualization and 16.5% average overhead due to the destructive code reads
Lockdown: Dynamic Control-Flow Integrity
Applications written in low-level languages without type or memory safety are
especially prone to memory corruption. Attackers gain code execution
capabilities through such applications despite all currently deployed defenses
by exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities. Control-Flow Integrity (CFI)
is a promising defense mechanism that restricts open control-flow transfers to
a static set of well-known locations. We present Lockdown, an approach to
dynamic CFI that protects legacy, binary-only executables and libraries.
Lockdown adaptively learns the control-flow graph of a running process using
information from a trusted dynamic loader. The sandbox component of Lockdown
restricts interactions between different shared objects to imported and
exported functions by enforcing fine-grained CFI checks. Our prototype
implementation shows that dynamic CFI results in low performance overhead.Comment: ETH Technical Repor
In-Vivo Bytecode Instrumentation for Improving Privacy on Android Smartphones in Uncertain Environments
In this paper we claim that an efficient and readily applicable means to
improve privacy of Android applications is: 1) to perform runtime monitoring by
instrumenting the application bytecode and 2) in-vivo, i.e. directly on the
smartphone. We present a tool chain to do this and present experimental results
showing that this tool chain can run on smartphones in a reasonable amount of
time and with a realistic effort. Our findings also identify challenges to be
addressed before running powerful runtime monitoring and instrumentations
directly on smartphones. We implemented two use-cases leveraging the tool
chain: BetterPermissions, a fine-grained user centric permission policy system
and AdRemover an advertisement remover. Both prototypes improve the privacy of
Android systems thanks to in-vivo bytecode instrumentation.Comment: ISBN: 978-2-87971-111-
Parallel software for lattice N=4 supersymmetric Yang--Mills theory
We present new parallel software, SUSY LATTICE, for lattice studies of
four-dimensional supersymmetric Yang--Mills theory with gauge
group SU(N). The lattice action is constructed to exactly preserve a single
supersymmetry charge at non-zero lattice spacing, up to additional potential
terms included to stabilize numerical simulations. The software evolved from
the MILC code for lattice QCD, and retains a similar large-scale framework
despite the different target theory. Many routines are adapted from an existing
serial code, which SUSY LATTICE supersedes. This paper provides an overview of
the new parallel software, summarizing the lattice system, describing the
applications that are currently provided and explaining their basic workflow
for non-experts in lattice gauge theory. We discuss the parallel performance of
the code, and highlight some notable aspects of the documentation for those
interested in contributing to its future development.Comment: Code available at https://github.com/daschaich/sus
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