Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is a property that guarantees

program control flow cannot be subverted by a malicious adversary,

even if the adversary has complete control of data

memory. We have shown in prior work how CFI can be enforced

by using inlined software guards that perform safety

checks. The first part of this paper shows how modest Instruction

Set Architecture (ISA) support can replace such

guard code with single instructions.

On the foundation of CFI we have implemented XFI: a protection

system that offers fine-grained memory access control

and fundamental integrity guarantees for critical system

state. XFI can be seen as a flexible, generalized form

of software-based fault isolation (SFI). In the second part of

this paper we present ISA support for XFI, in the form of

simple bounds-check instructions.

CFI and XFI can significantly increase the security and integrity

of software execution. Our results indicate that support

for CFI and XFI is a straightforward, simple addition t

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In  ASID '06: Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Architectural and System Support for Improving Software Dependability

Publisher  Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
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