Watchdog Monitoring for Detecting and Handling of Control Flow Hijack on RISC-V-based Binaries

Oyinloye, Toyosi; Speakman, Lee; Eze, Thaddeus; O’Mahony, Lucas

Abstract

Control flow hijacking has been a major challenge in software security. Several means of protections have been developed but insecurities persist. This is because existing protections have sometimes been circumvented while some resilient protections do not cover all applications. Studies have revealed that a holistic way of tackling software insecurity could involve watchdog monitoring and detection via Control Flow Integrity (CFI). The CFI concept has shown a good measure of reliability to mitigate control flow hijacking. However, sophisticated attack techniques in the form of Return Oriented Programming (ROP) have persisted. A flexible protection is desirable, which not only covers as many architecture structures as possible but also mitigates known resilient attacks like ROP. The solution proffered here is a hybrid of CFI and watchdog timing via inter-process signaling (IP-CFI). It is a software-based protection that involves recompilation of the target program. The implementation here is on vulnerable RISC-V-based process but is flexible and could be adapted on other architectures. We present a proof of concept in IP-CFI which when applied to a vulnerable program, ROP is mitigated. The target program incurs a run-time overhead of 1.5%. The code is available.

Citation

Oyinloye, T., Speakman, L., Eze, T., & O’Mahony, L. (2022). Watchdog Monitoring for Detecting and Handling of Control Flow Hijack on RISC-V-based Binaries. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 13(8), 10. https://doi.org/10.14569/ijacsa.2022.0130896

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 31, 2022
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jan 10, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 14, 2025
• Journal: International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications
• Print ISSN: 2158-107X
• Electronic ISSN: 2158-107X
• Publisher: SAI Organization
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 8
• Pages: 10
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.14569/ijacsa.2022.0130896
• Keywords: Watchdog; return oriented programming; RISC-V; control flow integrity; software security