C vulnerabilities usually hold verbatim for C++ programs. The counterfeit-object-oriented programming attack demonstrated that this relation is asymmetric, i.e., it only applies to C++. The problem pinpointed by this COOP attack is that C++ does not validate the integrity of its objects. By injecting malicious objects with manipulated virtual function table pointers, attackers can hijack control-flow of programs. The software security community addressed the COOP-problem in the years following its discovery, but together with the emergence of transient-execution attacks, such as Spectre, researchers also shifted their attention. We present Hobbit, a software-only solution to prevent COOP attacks by validating object integrity for virtual function pointer tables. Hobbit does not require any hardware specific features, scales to multi-million lines of C++ source code, and our LLVM-based implementation offers a configurable performance impact between 121.63% and 2.80% on compute-intensive SPEC CPU C++ benchmarks. Hobbit’s security analysis indicates strong resistance to brute forcing attacks and demonstrates additional benefits of using execute-only memory.
@InProceedings{bernad_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.7, author = {Bernad, Matthias and Brunthaler, Stefan}, title = {{HOBBIT: Hashed OBject Based InTegrity}}, booktitle = {38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024)}, pages = {7:1--7:25}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-341-6}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2024}, volume = {313}, editor = {Aldrich, Jonathan and Salvaneschi, Guido}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.7}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-208566}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.7}, annote = {Keywords: software security, code-reuse attacks, language-based security, counterfeit-object-oriented programming, object integrity, compiler security} }
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