Towards Automated Application-Specific Software Stacks

Abstract

Software complexity has increased over the years. One common way to tackle this complexity during development is to encapsulate features into a shared library. This allows developers to reuse already implemented features instead of reimplementing them over and over again. However, not all features provided by a shared library are actually used by an application. As a result, an application using shared libraries loads unused code into memory, which an attacker can use to perform code-reuse and similar types of attacks. The same holds for applications written in a scripting language such as PHP or Ruby: The interpreter typically offers much more functionality than is actually required by the application and hence provides a larger overall attack surface. In this paper, we tackle this problem and propose a first step towards automated application-specific software stacks. We present a compiler extension capable of removing unneeded code from shared libraries and---with the help of domain knowledge---also capable of removing unused functionalities from an interpreter's code base during the compilation process. Our evaluation against a diverse set of real-world applications, among others Nginx, Lighttpd, and the PHP interpreter, removes on average 71.3% of the code in musl-libc, a popular libc implementation. The evaluation on web applications show that a tailored PHP interpreter can mitigate entire vulnerability classes, as is the case for OpenConf. We demonstrate the applicability of our debloating approach by creating an application-specific software stack for a Wordpress web application: we tailor the libc library to the Nginx web server and PHP interpreter, whereas the PHP interpreter is tailored to the Wordpress web application. In this real-world scenario, the code of the libc is decreased by 65.1% in total, thereby reducing the available code for code-reuse attacks.