Taming Parallelism in a Multi-Variant Execution Environment
Stijn Volckaert, Bart Coppens, Bjorn De Sutter, Koen De Bosschere, Per Larsen, Michael Franz · 2017
Exploit mitigations, by themselves, do not stop determined and well-resourced adversaries from compromising vulnerable software through memory corruption. Multi-variant execution environments (MVEEs) add additional assurance by executing multiple, diversified copies (variants) of the same program in lockstep while monitoring their behavior for signs of attacks (divergence). While executing multiple copies of the same program requires additional computational resources, modern MVEEs run many workloads at near-native speed and can detect adversaries before they leak secrets or achieve persistence on the host system.