TY - GEN
T1 - On the Impact of Exception Handling Compatibility on Binary Instrumentation
AU - Priyadarshan, Soumyakant
AU - Nguyen, Huan
AU - Sekar, R.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/11/13
Y1 - 2020/11/13
N2 - To support C++ exception handling, compilers generate metadata that is a rich source of information about the code layout. On Linux, this metadata is also used to support stack tracing, thread cleanup and other functions. For this reason, Linux binaries contain code-layout-revealing metadata for C-code as well. Even hand-written assembly in low-level system libraries is covered by such metadata. We investigate the implications of this metadata in this paper, and show that it can be used to (a) improve accuracy of disassembly, (b) achieve significantly better accuracy at function boundary identification as compared to previous research, and (c) as a rich source of information for defeating fine-grained code randomization.
AB - To support C++ exception handling, compilers generate metadata that is a rich source of information about the code layout. On Linux, this metadata is also used to support stack tracing, thread cleanup and other functions. For this reason, Linux binaries contain code-layout-revealing metadata for C-code as well. Even hand-written assembly in low-level system libraries is covered by such metadata. We investigate the implications of this metadata in this paper, and show that it can be used to (a) improve accuracy of disassembly, (b) achieve significantly better accuracy at function boundary identification as compared to previous research, and (c) as a rich source of information for defeating fine-grained code randomization.
KW - binary instrumentation
KW - code diversification
KW - code randomization
KW - disassembly
KW - exception handling
KW - function identification
KW - reverse engineering
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85097714036
U2 - 10.1145/3411502.3418428
DO - 10.1145/3411502.3418428
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85097714036
T3 - FEAST 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Workshop on Forming an Ecosystem Around Software Transformation
SP - 23
EP - 28
BT - FEAST 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Workshop on Forming an Ecosystem Around Software Transformation
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 5th ACM Workshop on Forming an Ecosystem Around Software Transformation, FEAST 2020
Y2 - 13 November 2020
ER -