Defeating return-oriented rootkits with " Return-Less " kernels
Jinku Li, Zhi Wang, Xuxian Jiang, Michael C. Grace, Sina Bahram · 2010
Targeting the operating system (OS) kernel, kernel rootkits pose a formidable threat to computer systems and their users. Recent efforts have made significant progress in blocking them from injecting malicious code into the OS kernel for execution. Unfortunately, they cannot block the emerging so-called return-oriented rootkits (RORs). Without the need of injecting their own malicious code, these rootkits can discover and chain together "return-oriented gadgets" (that consist of only legitimate kernel code) for rootkit computation.