Flaw in Intel CPUs could help attackers defeat ASLR exploit defense
A feature in Intel's Haswell CPUs can be abused to reliably defeat an anti-exploitation technology that exists in all major operating systems, researchers have found.
The technique, developed by three researchers from State University of New York at Binghamton and the University of California in Riverside, can be used to bypass ASLR (address space layout randomization) and was presented this week at the 49th annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture in Taipei.
ASLR is a security mechanism used by operating systems to randomize the memory addresses used by key areas of processes, so that attackers don't know where to inject their exploit shellcode. ASLR is used to prevent memory corruption bugs, such as stack and heap overflows, from arbitrary code execution as opposed to crashes. Once such a vulnerability is exploited, the malicious code needs to be injected at a position in memory where the target process or the OS kernel itself will execute as part of normal operation.
