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

DARWIN: Survival of the Fittest Fuzzing Mutators

Patrick Jauernig (Technical University of Darmstadt), Domagoj Jakobovic (University of Zagreb, Croatia), Stjepan Picek (Radboud University and TU Delft), Emmanuel Stapf (Technical University of Darmstadt), Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Technical University of Darmstadt)

Read More

ProbFlow : Using Probabilistic Programming in Anonymous Communication Networks

Hussein Darir (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Geir Dullerud (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Nikita Borisov (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Read More

BEAGLE: Forensics of Deep Learning Backdoor Attack for Better...

Siyuan Cheng (Purdue University), Guanhong Tao (Purdue University), Yingqi Liu (Purdue University), Shengwei An (Purdue University), Xiangzhe Xu (Purdue University), Shiwei Feng (Purdue University), Guangyu Shen (Purdue University), Kaiyuan Zhang (Purdue University), Qiuling Xu (Purdue University), Shiqing Ma (Rutgers University), Xiangyu Zhang (Purdue University)

Read More

Efficient Dynamic Proof of Retrievability for Cold Storage

Tung Le (Virginia Tech), Pengzhi Huang (Cornell University), Attila A. Yavuz (University of South Florida), Elaine Shi (CMU), Thang Hoang (Virginia Tech)

Read More