UnderTracker: Generating Robust Binaries Using Execution Flow Traces

Rajesh Kumar Shrivastava () and Chittaranjan Hota ()
Additional contact information
Rajesh Kumar Shrivastava: Geetahnajali Collage of Engineering and Technology
Chittaranjan Hota: Birla Institute of Technology and Science

Information Systems Frontiers, 2021, vol. 23, issue 4, No 8, 915-930

Abstract: Abstract Programs are developed in a manner so that they execute and fulfill their intended purpose. In doing so, programmers trust the language to help them achieve their goals. Binary hardening is one such concept that prevents program behavior deviation and conveys the programmer’s intention. Therefore, to maintain the integrity of the program, measures need to be taken to avoid code-tampering. The proposed approach enforces code verification from instruction-to-instruction by using the programmer’s intended control flow. UnderTracker implements execution flow at the instruction cache by utilizing the read-only data-cache available in the program. The key idea is to place a control transfer code in data-cache and call it from instruction cache via labels. UnderTracker injects labels into the binary without affecting the semantics of the program. After the code execution starts, it verifies every control point’s legality before passing the control to the next instruction, by passively monitoring the execution flow. We proposed a cache-based monitoring method to verify code integrity. In this, we used side-channel information to monitor the program’s execution state. This monitoring system uses a sliding window scheme to detect the violation of code integrity with high reliability. This paper proposes an efficient technique, called UnderTracker to strengthen the binary integrity of an I/O intensive running program, with the nominal overhead of only 5-6% on top of the normal execution.

Keywords: Superblock; Execution flow verification; Systems security; Cache-based monitoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10796-020-10095-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infosf:v:23:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s10796-020-10095-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10796

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-020-10095-4

Access Statistics for this article

Information Systems Frontiers is currently edited by Ram Ramesh and Raghav Rao

More articles in Information Systems Frontiers from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().