Control-Flow Integrity: Precision, Security, and Performance

TL;DR

This paper systematically compares various Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) mechanisms in terms of security guarantees, precision, and performance, providing a unified evaluation framework for these defenses against control-flow hijacking attacks.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive comparison methodology for CFI mechanisms, including security, precision, and empirical performance assessments, filling a gap in standardized evaluation protocols.

Findings

Different CFI mechanisms vary in security guarantees and protection precision.

Empirical performance evaluations reveal trade-offs between security and runtime overhead.

The study provides a unified framework for comparing CFI techniques systematically.

Abstract

Memory corruption errors in C/C++ programs remain the most common source of security vulnerabilities in today's systems. Control-flow hijacking attacks exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities to divert program execution away from the intended control flow. Researchers have spent more than a decade studying and refining defenses based on Control-Flow Integrity (CFI), and this technique is now integrated into several production compilers. However, so far no study has systematically compared the various proposed CFI mechanisms, nor is there any protocol on how to compare such mechanisms. We compare a broad range of CFI mechanisms using a unified nomenclature based on (i) a qualitative discussion of the conceptual security guarantees, (ii) a quantitative security evaluation, and (iii) an empirical evaluation of their performance in the same test environment. For each mechanism, we evaluate (i) protected types of control-flow transfers, (ii) the precision of the protection for forward and backward edges. For open-source compiler-based implementations, we additionally evaluate (iii) the generated equivalence classes and target sets, and (iv) the runtime performance.