SoK: Automated Software Diversity

By Per Larsen, Andrei Homescu, Stefan Brunthaler, Michael Franz. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2014

381 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The idea of automatic software diversity is at least two decades old. The deficiencies of currently deployed defenses and the transition to online software distribution (the "App store" model) for traditional and mobile computers has revived the interest in automatic software diversity. Consequently, the literature on diversity grew by more than two dozen papers since 2008. Diversity offers several unique properties. Unlike other defenses, it introduces uncertainty in the target. Precise knowledge of the target software provides the underpinning for a wide range of attacks. This makes diversity a broad rather than narrowly focused defense mechanism. Second, diversity offers probabilistic protection similar to cryptography-attacks may succeed by chance so implementations must offer high entropy. Finally, the design space of diversifying program transformations is large. As a result, researchers have proposed multiple approaches to software diversity that vary with respect to threat models, security, performance, and practicality. In this paper, we systematically study the state-of-the-art in software diversity and highlight fundamental trade-offs between fully automated approaches. We also point to open areas and unresolved challenges. These include "hybrid solutions", error reporting, patching, and implementation disclosure attacks on diversified software.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Signal Processing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1fc70673e56000e26b5ec15059e1254dd2975080

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Computer Networks and Communications

In Signal Processing

Citations in the corpus

Control-Flow Integrity (2017, background): “This dispenses with the concern that CFI enforcement is too costly in practice compared to alternative mitigations including those based on randomization [Larsen et al. 2014].”
Toward Proactive, Adaptive Defense: A Survey on Moving Target Defense (2019, background): “In automated software diversity, a program can diversify at instruction, block, loop, program and system levels in different phases of the life cycle, such as compilation and linking, or installation [92].”
C-FLAT: Control-Flow Attestation for Embedded Systems Software (2016, background): “Keywords remote attestation; control-flow attacks; embedded system security”
SGXBOUNDS: Memory Safety for Shielded Execution (2017, neutral): “Also note that Address Space Randomization (ASR) and its fine-grained variants [31, 34, 41, 50] do not have sufficient bit entropy in SGX en- claves (recall that SGX restricts enclave address space to only 36 bits) and thus can be easily broken [70, 72].”