CETIS: Retrofitting Intel CET for Generic and Efficient Intra-process Memory Isolation

Mengyao Xie, Chenggang Wu, Yinqian Zhang, Jiali Xu, Yuanming Lai, Yan Kang, Wei Wang, Zhe Wang

Abstract: Intel control-flow enforcement technology (CET) is a new hardware feature available in recent Intel processors. It supports the coarse-grained control-flow integrity for software to defeat memory corruption attacks. In this paper, we retrofit CET, particularly the write-protected shadow pages of CET used for implementing shadow stacks, to develop a generic and efficient intra-process memory isolation mechanism, dubbed CETIS. To provide user-friendly interfaces, a CETIS framework was developed, which provides memory file abstraction for the isolated memory regions and a set of APIs to access said regions. CETIS also comes with a compiler-assisted tool chain for users to build secure applications easily. The practicality of using CETIS to protect CPI, CFIXX, and JIT-compilers was demonstrated, and the evaluation reveals that CETIS is performed better than state-of-the-art intra-memory isolation mechanisms, such as MPK.