PFHaD: Page Fault Handler Assisted Defense Against Data-Oriented Attacks
摘要
As memory corruption vulnerabilities evolve, attackers have shifted focus from traditional control-flow attacks to non-control data attacks, which manipulate data influencing a program′s behavior without altering its control flow. This shift bypasses conventional defenses like Control Flow Integrity (CFI), posing new security risks. In response, we propose a novel defense mechanism called Page Fault Handler-assisted Defense (PFHaD). PFHaD leverages hardware page faults to protect critical data in memory, providing robust defense against non-control data attacks with minimal performance overhead. Unlike traditional defenses, PFHaD also prevents information leakage by making critical data pages inaccessible. The solution does not require modifications to hardware, compilers, or operating systems, making it ideal for commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software. Experimental results demonstrate that PFHaD effectively mitigates a wide range of non-control data attacks while maintaining low performance impact, offering a scalable and efficient solution to modern memory corruption threats.