Nozzle: A Defense Against Heap-spraying Code Injection Attacks

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/livshits/papers/pdf/usenixsec09b.pdf

Heap spraying is a security attack that increases the exploitability of memory corruption errors in type-unsafe applications. In a heap-spraying attack, an attacker coerces an application to allocate many objects containing malicious code in the heap, increasing the success rate of an exploit that jumps to a location within the heap. Because heap layout randomization necessitates new forms of attack, spraying has been used in many recent security exploits. Spraying is especially effective in web browsers, where the attacker can easily allocate the malicious objects using JavaScript embedded in a web page. In this paper, we describe NOZZLE, a runtime heap-spraying detector. NOZZLE examines individual objects in the heap, interpreting them as code and performing a static analysis on that code to detect malicious intent. To reduce false positives, we aggregate measurements across all heap objects and define a global heap health metric.