Efficient Buffer-Overflow Prevention Technique Using Binary Rewriting
Yun-Sam Kim, Eun-Sun Cho · The KIPS Transactions PartC · 2005
Buffer overflow is one of the most prevalent and critical internet security vulnerabilities. Recently, various methods to prevent buffer overflow attacks have been investigated, but they are still difficult to apply to real applications due to their run-time overhead. This paper suggests an efficient rewrite method to prevent buffer-overflow attacks only with lower costs by generating a redundant copy of the return address in stack frame and comparing return address to copied return address. Not to be overwritten by the attack data the new copy will have the lower address number than local buffers have. In addition, for a safer execution environment, every vulnerable function call is transformed during the rewriting procedure.