Zhiqiang Lin, Xiangyu Zhang, Dongyan Xu

CERIAS TR 2009-29

techreport

We introduce a reuse-oriented camouflaging attack – a new threat to legal software binaries. To perform a malicious action, such an attack will identify and reuse an existing function in a legal binary program instead of implementing the function itself. Furthermore, the attack is stealthy in that the malicious invocation of a targeted function usually takes place in a location where it is legal to do so, closely mimicking a legal invocation. At the network level, the victim binary can still follow its communication protocol without exhibiting any anomalous behavior. Meanwhile, many close-source shareware binaries are rich in functions that can be maliciously "reused," making them attractive targets of this type of attack. In this paper, we present a framework to determine if a given binary program is vulnerable to this attack and to construct a concrete attack if so. Our experiments with a number of real-world software binaries demonstrate that the reuse-oriented camouflaging attacks are real and vulnerabilities in the binaries can be effectively revealed and confirmed.

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2009 – 11 – 11

Lin

2009-04-20