A Taxonomy of Defenses against Memory Corruption Attacks

Vulnerabilities caused by memory corruption related bugs are a pervasive threat, continually undermining the security of the whole computing environment. The lack of memory safety mechanisms in indispensable systems programming languages like C or C++ leaves plenty of room for programmer-induced errors which often result in catastrophic security breaches. We analyze the root causes of these vulnerabilities, providing a concise overview of memory corruption bugs and related attacks. Although present in a number of programming languages, we use the C/C++ programming language as a basis for our analyses. We categorize existing defensive mechanisms based on the attack techniques they focused on preventing and give a brief insight into state-of-the-art defenses introduced throughout the years, with a special focus on operating system defenses.