Research Article
Defending Use-After-Free via Relationship Between Memory and Pointer
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-030-67537-0_35, author={Guangquan Xu and Miao Li and Xiaotong Li and Kai Chen and Ran Wang and Wei Wang and Kaitai Liang and Qiang Tang and Shaoying Liu}, title={Defending Use-After-Free via Relationship Between Memory and Pointer}, proceedings={Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. 16th EAI International Conference, CollaborateCom 2020, Shanghai, China, October 16--18, 2020, Proceedings, Part I}, proceedings_a={COLLABORATECOM}, year={2021}, month={1}, keywords={Use-after-free vulnerability Fine-grained memory permission management Static instrumentation}, doi={10.1007/978-3-030-67537-0_35} }- Guangquan Xu
Miao Li
Xiaotong Li
Kai Chen
Ran Wang
Wei Wang
Kaitai Liang
Qiang Tang
Shaoying Liu
Year: 2021
Defending Use-After-Free via Relationship Between Memory and Pointer
COLLABORATECOM
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-67537-0_35
Abstract
Existing approaches to defending Use-After-Free (UAF) exploits are usually done using static or dynamic analysis. However, both static and dynamic analysis suffer from intrinsic deficiencies. The existing static analysis is limited in handling loops, optimization of memory representation. The existing dynamic analysis, which is characterized by lacking the maintenance of pointer information, may lead to flaws that the relationships between pointers and memory cannot be precisely identified.
In this work, we propose a new method called UAF-GUARD without the above barriers, in the aim to defending against UAF exploits using fine-grained memory permission management. In particular, we design a key data structure to support the fine-grained memory permission management, which can maintain more information to capture the relationship between pointers and memory. Moreover, we design code instrumentation to enable UAF-GUARD to precisely locate the position of UAF vulnerabilities to further terminate malicious programs when anomalies are detected.
We implement UAF-GUARD on a 64-bit Linux system. We carry out experiments to compare UAF-GUARD with the main existing approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that UAF-GUARD is able to effectively and efficiently defend against three types of UAF exploits with acceptable space overhead and time overhead.
