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HOBBIT: Hashed OBject Based InTegrity

Authors Matthias Bernad , Stefan Brunthaler

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Software security engineering
  • Software and its engineering → Compilers
Keywords
  • software security
  • code-reuse attacks
  • language-based security
  • counterfeit-object-oriented programming
  • object integrity
  • compiler security

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Abstract

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.

Cite As Get BibTex

Matthias Bernad and Stefan Brunthaler. HOBBIT: Hashed OBject Based InTegrity. In 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 313, pp. 7:1-7:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.7

Author Details

Matthias Bernad
  • μCSRL – Munich Computer Systems Research Lab, Research Institute CODE, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Neubiberg, Germany
Stefan Brunthaler
  • μCSRL – Munich Computer Systems Research Lab, Research Institute CODE, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Neubiberg, Germany

Funding

The research reported in this paper has been funded by the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK), the Federal Ministry for Labour and Economy (BMAW), and the State of Upper Austria in the frame of the COMET Module Dependable Production Environments with Software Security (DEPS) [(FFG grant no. 888338)] within the COMET - Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies Programme managed by Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG.

Supplementary Materials

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