Authors, Creators & Presenters: Shixin Song (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Joseph Zhang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Mengjia Yan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
PAPER
Oreo: Protecting ASLR Against Microarchitectural Attacks
Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is one of the most prominently deployed mitigations against memory corruption attacks. ASLR randomly shuffles program virtual addresses to prevent attackers from knowing the location of program contents in memory. Microarchitectural side channels have been shown to defeat ASLR through various hardware mechanisms. We systematically analyze existing microarchitectural attacks and identify multiple leakage paths. Given the vast attack surface exposed by ASLR, it is challenging to effectively prevent leaking the ASLR secret against microarchitectural attacks. Motivated by this, we present Oreo, a software-hardware co-design mitigation that strengthens ASLR against these attacks. Oreo uses a new memory mapping interface to remove secret randomized bits in virtual addresses before translating them to their corresponding physical addresses. This extra step hides randomized virtual addresses from microarchitecture structures, preventing side channels from leaking ASLR secrets. Oreo is transparent to user programs and incurs low overhead. We prototyped and evaluated our design on Linux using the hardware simulator gem5.
Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the organization’s’ YouTube channel.
The post NDSS 2025 – Oreo: Protecting ASLR Against Micro-Architectural Attacks appeared first on Security Boulevard.
Marc Handelman
Source: Security Boulevard
Source Link: https://securityboulevard.com/2025/10/ndss-2025-oreo-protecting-aslr-against-micro-architectural-attacks/