SecGOT: Secure Global Offset Tables in ELF Executables

DOI

10.2991/iccsee.2013.250How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Global Offset Table Hijacking, Function Pointer, Randomization, Dynamic Linker, ELF

Abstract

Global Offset Table (GOT) is an important feature to support library sharing in Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) applications. The addresses of external modules’ global variables and functions are runtime resolved and stored in the GOT and then are used by the program. If attackers tamper with the function pointers in the GOT, they can hijack the program’s control flow and execute arbitrary malicious code. Current research pays few attentions on this threat (i.e. GOT hijacking attack). In this paper, we proposed and implemented a protection mechanism SecGOT to randomize the GOT at load time, and thus prevent attackers from guessing the GOT’s position and tampering with the function pointers. SecGOT is evaluated against 101 binaries in the /bin directory for Linux. The results show that it introduced quite low load-time overhead and provides an effective protection against GOT hijacking attacks.

Copyright

© 2013, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chao Zhang
AU  - Lei Duan
AU  - Tao Wei
AU  - Wei Zou
PY  - 2013/03
DA  - 2013/03
TI  - SecGOT: Secure Global Offset Tables in ELF Executables
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (ICCSEE 2013)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 995
EP  - 998
SN  - 1951-6851
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iccsee.2013.250
DO  - 10.2991/iccsee.2013.250
ID  - Zhang2013/03
ER  -