International Business Machines Corporation
Enhancing memory safe programming using a page frame tag mechanism

Abstract:

A technique for mitigating against return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks that occur during execution of an application includes receiving source code to compile into an executable application. During a compilation of the source code, one or more functions within the source code that are associated with gadgets in an ROP attack are determined, each of the one or more functions is assigned to one or more protected pages of memory for the executable application, and a tag is assigned to each of the one or more functions. The tag for each function maps to the protected page of memory to which the function is assigned.