MTD Techniques for Memory Protection Against Zero-Day Attacks

Ping Chen, Zhisheng Hu, Jun Xu, Minghui Zhu, Rob Erbacher, Sushil Jajodia, Peng Liu

Abstract: During the past 25 years, the arms race between attacks exploiting memory corruption and memory protection techniques has drawn tremendous attention. This book chapter seeks to give an in-depth review of the newest research progress made on applying the MTD methodology to protect memory corruption exploits. The new research progress also represents the current phase of the arms race in the MTD perspective. In particular, on one hand, at the frontier of defending against control-hijacking attacks, we will give an in-depth review on the shift of defense strategy from static ASLR to dynamic ASLR. On the other hand, at the frontier of defending against data-oriented attacks, we will give an in-depth review on the shift of defense strategy from static DSLR to dynamic DSLR.