StackGuard: automatic adaptive detection and prevention of buffer-overflow attacks

TLDR

Buffer‑overflow attacks, first highlighted by the 1988 Morris Worm, remain a persistent threat with many sophisticated exploits still emerging. The authors propose StackGuard, a compiler‑based technique that aims to virtually eliminate buffer‑overflow vulnerabilities while incurring only modest performance costs. StackGuard is a simple GCC patch that, when applied to privileged programs, prevents control transfer to attackers by entering a fail‑safe state, requires no source changes, is binary‑compatible, and offers configurable trade‑offs between penetration resistance and performance. Experimental results demonstrate that StackGuard significantly improves penetration resistance with only modest performance overhead.

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic solution to the persistent problem of buffer overflow attacks. Buffer overflow attacks gained notoriety in 1988 as part of the Morris Worm incident on the Internet. While it is fairly simple to fix individual buffer overflow vulnerabilities, buffer overflow attacks continue to this day. Hundreds of attacks have been discovered, and while most of the obvious vulnerabilities have now been patched, more sophisticated buffer overflow attacks continue to emerge. We describe StackGuard: a simple compiler technique that virtually eliminates buffer overflow vulnerabilities with only modest performance penalties. Privileged programs that are recompiled with the StackGuard compiler extension no longer yield control to the attacker, but rather enter a fail-safe state. These programs require no source code changes at all, and are binary-compatible with existing operating systems and libraries. We describe the compiler technique (a simple patch to gcc), as well as a set of variations on the technique that trade-off between penetration resistance and performance. We present experimental results of both the penetration resistance and the performance impact of this technique.