Samuel Mergendahl (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Nathan Burow (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Hamed Okhravi (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)

Memory corruption attacks against unsafe programming languages like C/C++ have been a major threat to computer systems for multiple decades. Various sanitizers and runtime exploit mitigation techniques have been shown to only provide partial protection at best. Recently developed ‘safe’ programming languages such as Rust and Go hold the promise to change this paradigm by preventing memory corruption bugs using a strong type system and proper compile-time and runtime checks. Gradual deployment of these languages has been touted as a way of improving the security of existing applications before entire applications can be developed in safe languages. This is notable in popular applications such as Firefox and Tor. In this paper, we systematically analyze the security of multi-language applications. We show that because language safety checks in safe languages and exploit mitigation techniques applied to unsafe languages (e.g., Control-Flow Integrity) break different stages of an exploit to prevent control hijacking attacks, an attacker can carefully maneuver between the languages to mount a successful attack. In essence, we illustrate that the incompatible set of assumptions made in various languages enables attacks that are not possible in each language alone. We study different variants of these attacks and analyze Firefox to illustrate the feasibility and extent of this problem. Our findings show that gradual deployment of safe programming languages, if not done with extreme care, can indeed be detrimental to security.

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Let’s Authenticate: Automated Certificates for User Authentication

James Conners (Brigham Young University), Corey Devenport (Brigham Young University), Stephen Derbidge (Brigham Young University), Natalie Farnsworth (Brigham Young University), Kyler Gates (Brigham Young University), Stephen Lambert (Brigham Young University), Christopher McClain (Brigham Young University), Parker Nichols (Brigham Young University), Daniel Zappala (Brigham Young University)

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What the Fork? Finding and Analyzing Malware in GitHub...

Alan Cao (New York University) and Brendan Dolan-Gavitt (New York University)

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NC-Max: Breaking the Security-Performance Tradeoff in Nakamoto Consensus

Ren Zhang (Nervos), Dingwei Zhang (Nervos), Quake Wang (Nervos), Shichen Wu (School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shandong University), Jan Xie (Nervos), Bart Preneel (imec-COSIC, KU Leuven)

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