Abusing Performance Optimization Weaknesses to Bypass ASLR

By Byoungyoung Lee, Yeongjin Jang, and Tielei Wang

"The primary goal of ASLR is to effectively randomize a program's memory layout so that adversaries cannot easily infer such information. As ASLR is a critical defense against exploitation, there have been tremendous efforts to evaluate the mechanism's security. To date, previous attacks that bypass ASLR have focused mostly on exploiting memory leak vulnerabilities, or abusing non-randomized data structures.

In this presentation, we leverage vulnerabilities introduced by performance-oriented software design to reveal new ways in which ASLR can be bypassed. In addition to describing how vulnerabilities originate from such designs, we will present real attacks that exploit them.

First, we analyze general hash table designs for various programming languages (JavaScript, Python, Ruby). To optimize object tracking for such languages, their interpreters may leak address information. Some hash table implementations directly store the address information in the table, while others permit inference of address information through repeated table scanning. We exhaustively examined several popular languages to see whether each of them has one or both of these problems, and present how they can be leveraged. As a concrete example, we demonstrate how address information can be leaked in the Safari web browser by simply running some JavaScript.

Second, we present an analysis of the Zygote process creation model, which is an Android operating system design for speeding up application launches. The results of our examination show that Zygote weakens ASLR because all applications are created with largely identical memory layouts. To highlight the severity of this issue, we demonstrate two different ASLR bypass attacks using real applications - Google Chrome and VLC Media Player."