• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.178-192
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• 2006

The buffer overflow attack is the single most dominant and lethal form of security exploits as evidenced by recent worm outbreaks such as Code Red and SQL Stammer. In this paper, we propose microarchitectural techniques that can detect and recover from such malicious code attacks. The idea is that the buffer overflow attacks usually exhibit abnormal behaviors in the system. This kind of unusual signs can be easily detected by checking the safety of memory references at runtime, avoiding the potential data or control corruptions made by such attacks. Both the hardware cost and the performance penalty of enforcing the safety guards are negligible. In addition, we propose a more aggressive technique called corruption recovery buffer (CRB), which can further increase the level of security. Combined with the safety guards, the CRB can be used to save suspicious writes made by an attack and can restore the original architecture state before the attack. By performing detailed execution-driven simulations on the programs selected from SPEC CPU2000 benchmark, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed microarchitectural techniques. Experimental data shows that enforcing a single safety guard can reduce the number of system failures substantially by protecting the stack against return address corruptions made by the attacks. Furthermore, a small 1KB CRB can nullify additional data corruptions made by stack smashing attacks with only less than 2% performance penalty.