Miriam Birch

Dr. Miriam Birch

orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

8Years (2019-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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10 October 2019 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Sarwar SayeedSarwar Sayeed
Sarwar Sayeed
Hector Marco GisbertHector Marco Gisbert
Hector Marco Gisbert
IRIsmael Ripoll-Ripoll
Ismael Ripoll-Ripoll
MBMiriam Birch
Miriam Birch
Despite the intense efforts to prevent programmers from writing code with memory errors, memory corruption vulnerabilities are still a major security threat. Consequently, control-flow integrity has received significant attention in the research community, and software developers to combat control code execution attacks in the presence of type of faults. Control-flow Integrity (CFI) is a large family of techniques that aims to eradicate memory error exploitation by ensuring that the instruction pointer (IP) of a running process cannot be controlled by a malicious attacker. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of 14 CFI techniques against the most popular exploitation techniques, including code reuse attacks, return-to-user, return-to-libc, and replay attacks. We also classify these techniques based on their security, robustness, and implementation complexity. Our study indicates that the majority of the CFI techniques are primarily focused on restricting indirect branch instructions and cannot prevent all forms of vulnerability exploitation. We conclude that the performance overhead introduced, jointly with the partial attack coverage, is discouraging the industry from adopting most of them.