Execution at RISC: Stealth JOP Attacks on RISC-V Applications

TL;DR

This paper reveals that RISC-V architectures are vulnerable to stealthy Jump-Oriented Programming attacks, demonstrating a proof-of-concept exploit that can bypass protections and remotely access files on embedded systems.

Contribution

It uncovers RISC-V's susceptibility to JOP attacks, introduces new dispatcher gadgets, and demonstrates a practical attack on an embedded web server.

Findings

RISC-V is vulnerable to JOP attacks.

New dispatcher gadgets enable stealthy code-reuse attacks.

A remote file read vulnerability was demonstrated.

Abstract

RISC-V is a recently developed open instruction set architecture gaining a lot of attention. To achieve a lasting security on these systems and design efficient countermeasures, a better understanding of vulnerabilities to novel and potential future attacks is mandatory. This paper demonstrates that RISC-V is sensible to Jump-Oriented Programming, a class of complex code-reuse attacks. We provide an analysis of new dispatcher gadgets we discovered, and show how they can be used together in order to build a stealth attack, bypassing existing protections. A proof-of-concept attack is implemented on an embedded web server compiled for RISC-V, in which we introduced a vulnerability, allowing an attacker to remotely read an arbitrary file from the host machine.