Automating data-only attacks through Block Oriented Programming (BOP)
https://nebelwelt.net/blog/20181231-BOP.html [nebelwelt.net]
2019-01-01 02:44
With the rise of strong control-flow defenses such as Control-Flow Integrity (CFI), attackers will increasingly resort to data-only attacks that can be equally powerful. Earlier research demonstrated that data-only attacks can be as devastating as control-flow hijacking attacks. So far, constructing data-only attacks was cumbersome and required deep manual analysis. We introduce the idea of Block-Oriented Programming (BOP) where, based on a C-like programming language and the help of constraint solving, we automatically synthesize data-only exploits that run arbitrary payloads on host programs.