Check out the new USENIX Web site.

Home About USENIX Events Membership Publications Students
12th USENIX Security Symposium — Abstract

Pp. 91-104 of the Proceedings

PointGuard™: Protecting Pointers from Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities

Crispin Cowan, Steve Beattie, John Johansen, and Perry Wagle, Immunix, Inc.

Abstract

Despite numerous security technologies crafted to resist buffer overflow vulnerabilities, buffer overflows continue to be the dominant form of software security vulnerability. This is because most buffer overflow defenses provide only partial coverage, and the attacks have adapted to exploit problems that are not well-defended, such as heap overflows. This paper presents PointGuard, a compiler technique to defend against most kinds of buffer overflows by encrypting pointers when stored in memory, and decrypting them only when loaded into CPU registers. We describe the PointGuard implementation, show that PointGuard's overhead is low when protecting real security-sensitive applications such as OpenSSL, and show that PointGuard is effective in defending against buffer overflow vulnerabilities that are not blocked by previous defenses.
  • View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF.
    Click here if you have forgotten your password Until August 2004, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers. The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2003 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 7 Nov. 2003 jel
Technical Program
Security '03 Home
USENIX home