Layered object-oriented programming : advanced VTable reuse attacks on binary-level defense

• Main Authors: Wang, Chenyu, Chen, Bihuan, Liu, Yang, Wu, Hongjun
• Other Authors: School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering; Vtable Reuse Attacks; Control Flow Integrity
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/151282
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Vtable reuse attack, as a novel type of code reuse attacks, is introduced to bypass most binary-level control flow integrity enforcement and vtable integrity enforcement. So far, two binary-level defenses (TypeArmor and vfGuard) are proposed to defend against vtable reuse attacks. Both techniques use semantic information as the control flow integrity enforcement policy, i.e., TypeArmor and vfGuard utilize argument register count and dispatch offset at virtual callsite as the signature to check the validity of target functions, respectively. In this paper, we propose layered object-oriented programming (LOOP), an advanced vtable reuse attack, to show that the coarse-grained control flow integrity strategies are still vulnerable to vtable reuse attacks. In LOOP, we introduce argument expansion gadgets and transfer gadgets to, respectively, bypass TypeArmor and vfGuard. We generalize the characteristics of both gadgets and develop a tool to discover them at the binary level. We demonstrated that under the protection of TypeArmor and vfGuard, Firefox, Adobe Flash Player, and Internet Explorer are all vulnerable to LOOP attacks. Furthermore, we show the availability of argument expansion gadgets and transfer gadgets in common software or libraries.