Retrofitting XoM for Stripped Binaries without Embedded Data Relocation
Chenke Luo, Jiang Ming, Mengfei Xie, Guojun Peng, Jianming Fu

TL;DR
This paper introduces PXoM, a practical method for enhancing stripped binaries on x86-64 by using fine-grained memory permissions with Intel's hardware features, avoiding complex data relocation.
Contribution
PXoM provides a novel fine-grained permission control mechanism for stripped binaries, eliminating the need for embedded data relocation and improving security.
Findings
Negligible runtime overhead in benchmarks
Effective restriction of code read permissions
Enhanced security against gadget harvesting
Abstract
In this paper, we present PXoM, a practical technique to seamlessly retrofit XoM into stripped binaries on the x86-64 platform. As handling the mixture of code and data is a well-known challenge for XoM, most existing methods require the strict separation of code and data areas via either compile-time transformation or binary patching, so that the unreadable permission can be safely enforced at the granularity of memory pages. In contrast to previous approaches, we provide a fine-grained memory permission control mechanism to restrict the read permission of code while allowing legitimate data reads within code pages. This novelty enables PXoM to harden stripped binaries but without resorting to error-prone embedded data relocation. We leverage Intel's hardware feature, Memory Protection Keys, to offer an efficient fine-grained permission control. We measure PXoM's performance with both…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Neural Network Applications · Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques · Advanced Data Storage Technologies
