Automated CFI Policy Assessment with Reckon

Abstract

Protecting programs against control-flow hijacking attacks recently has become an arms race between defenders and attackers. While certain defenses, e.g., \textit{Control Flow Integrity} (CFI), restrict the targets of indirect control-flow transfers through static and dynamic analysis, attackers could search the program for available gadgets that fall into the legitimate target sets to bypass the defenses. There are several tools helping both attackers in developing exploits and analysts in strengthening their defenses. Yet, these tools fail to adequately (1) model the deployed defenses, (2) compare them in a head-to-head way, and (3) use program semantic information to help craft the attack and the countermeasures. Control Flow Integrity (CFI) has proved to be one of the promising defenses against control flow hijacks and tons of efforts have been made to improve CFI in various ways in the past decade. However, there is a lack of a systematic assessment of the existing CFI defenses. In this paper, we present Reckon, a static source code analysis tool for assessing state-of-the-art static CFI defenses, by first precisely modeling them and then evaluating them in a unified framework. Reckon helps determine the level of security offered by different CFI defenses, and find usable code gadgets even after the CFI defenses were applied, thus providing an important step towards successful exploits and stronger defenses. We have used Reckon to assess eight state-of-the-art static CFI defenses on real-world programs such as Google's Chrome and Apache Httpd. Reckon provides precise measurements of the residual attack surfaces, and accordingly ranks CFI policies against each other. It also successfully paves the way to construct code reuse attacks and to eliminate the remaining attack surface, by disclosing calltargets under one of the most restrictive CFI defenses.