Hugo Lefeuvre (The University of Manchester), Vlad-Andrei Bădoiu (University Politehnica of Bucharest), Yi Chen (Rice University), Felipe Huici (Unikraft.io), Nathan Dautenhahn (Rice University), Pierre Olivier (The University of Manchester)

Least-privilege separation decomposes applications into compartments limited to accessing only what they need. When compartmentalizing existing software, many approaches neglect securing the new inter-compartment interfaces, although what used to be a function call from/to a trusted component is now potentially a targeted attack from a malicious compartment. This results in an entire class of security bugs: Compartment Interface Vulnerabilities (CIVs).

This paper provides an in-depth study of CIVs. We taxonomize these issues and show that they affect all known compartmentalization approaches. We propose ConfFuzz, an in-memory fuzzer specialized to detect CIVs at possible compartment boundaries. We apply ConfFuzz to a set of 25 popular applications and 36 possible compartment APIs, to uncover a wide data-set of 629 vulnerabilities. We systematically study these issues, and extract numerous insights on the prevalence of CIVs, their causes, impact, and the complexity to address them. We stress the critical importance of CIVs in compartmentalization approaches, demonstrating an attack to extract isolated keys in OpenSSL and uncovering a decade-old vulnerability in sudo. We show, among others, that not all interfaces are affected in the same way, that API size is uncorrelated with CIV prevalence, and that addressing interface vulnerabilities goes beyond writing simple checks. We conclude the paper with guidelines for CIV-aware compartment interface design, and appeal for more research towards systematic CIV detection and mitigation.

View More Papers

The “Beatrix” Resurrections: Robust Backdoor Detection via Gram Matrices

Wanlun Ma (Swinburne University of Technology), Derui Wang (CSIRO’s Data61), Ruoxi Sun (The University of Adelaide & CSIRO's Data61), Minhui Xue (CSIRO's Data61), Sheng Wen (Swinburne University of Technology), Yang Xiang (Digital Research & Innovation Capability Platform, Swinburne University of Technology)

Read More

Smarter Contracts: Detecting Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts with Deep...

Christoph Sendner (University of Wuerzburg), Huili Chen (University of California San Diego), Hossein Fereidooni (Technische Universität Darmstadt), Lukas Petzi (University of Wuerzburg), Jan König (University of Wuerzburg), Jasper Stang (University of Wuerzburg), Alexandra Dmitrienko (University of Wuerzburg), Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Technical University of Darmstadt), Farinaz Koushanfar (University of California San Diego)

Read More

Improving In-vehicle Networks Intrusion Detection Using On-Device Transfer Learning

Sampath Rajapaksha (Robert Gordon University), Harsha Kalutarage (Robert Gordon University), M.Omar Al-Kadri (Birmingham City University), Andrei Petrovski (Robert Gordon University), Garikayi Madzudzo (Horiba Mira Ltd)

Read More