Back

Backward-edge control-flow hijacking via stack buffer overflow is the holy grail of software exploitation. The …

Resurrecting stack-based overflows (yet again)

4 stars

This paper explored the weaknesses and risks associated with modern exception handlers (across all major OS and architectures) in unwinding attacker-controlled state. The most powerful example is a bypass of stack canaries where a function throws an exception after the overflow but before the function return; the exception handler would eventually execute attacker-controlled memory.

There is an attempt to quantify the overall impact of this mitigation bypass by looking at the Debian repos for code that uses exception handlers, but it is quite context sensitive. The paper concludes with three CVEs that would be exploitable with current mitigations (stack canaries, etc.) using the new technique.