Towards a Science for Adaptive Defense: Revisit Server Protection
Zhisheng Hu, Ping Chen, Yang Lu, Minghui Zhu, Peng Liu · 2016
Suffering from the big "hit" by the Heartbleed attack, the society has learned one hard lesson, namely, the severity of zero-day continuous buffer over-read attacks. According to a survey on Heartbleed, 24-55% of HTTPS servers in the Alexa Top 1 Million were initially vulnerable to Heartbleed, including 44 of the Alexa Top 100. The Heartbleed attack is continuous buffer over-read: it usually lasts several hours, involving hundreds of thousands of probing (buffer over-read) requests. In most cases, a short period of time is insufficient for the attacker to achieve his/her goal. This paper presents our recent work on the development of adaptive defense systems which can practically defend against zero-day continuous buffer over-read attacks; i.e., Heartbleed-like attacks and data structure manipulation attacks, and meanwhile whose cost-effectiveness is mathematically provable.