Hybrid Indirect Branch Predictors

Design of Cost-Effective 2-Level Correlation Indirect-Branch Predictor

Chinese Journal of Computers ◽

10.3724/sp.j.1016.2008.01898 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 31 (11) ◽

pp. 1898-1906

Author(s):

Nan YUAN ◽

Dong-Rui FAN

Keyword(s):

Cost Effective ◽

Branch Predictor ◽

Indirect Branch

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Indirect Branch Validation Unit

Microprocessors and Microsystems ◽

10.1016/j.micpro.2009.09.002 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 33 (7-8) ◽

pp. 461-468 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Gyungho Lee ◽

Yixin Shi ◽

Hui Lin

Keyword(s):

Indirect Branch

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Control-Flow Integrity: Attacks and Protections

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app9204229 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (20) ◽

pp. 4229 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Sarwar Sayeed ◽

Hector Marco-Gisbert ◽

Ismael Ripoll ◽

Miriam Birch

Keyword(s):

Large Family ◽

Research Community ◽

Control Flow ◽

Security Threat ◽

Memory Errors ◽

Software Developers ◽

Control Flow Integrity ◽

Indirect Branch ◽

With Memory ◽

Significant Attention

Despite the intense efforts to prevent programmers from writing code with memory errors, memory corruption vulnerabilities are still a major security threat. Consequently, control-flow integrity has received significant attention in the research community, and software developers to combat control code execution attacks in the presence of type of faults. Control-flow Integrity (CFI) is a large family of techniques that aims to eradicate memory error exploitation by ensuring that the instruction pointer (IP) of a running process cannot be controlled by a malicious attacker. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of 14 CFI techniques against the most popular exploitation techniques, including code reuse attacks, return-to-user, return-to-libc, and replay attacks. We also classify these techniques based on their security, robustness, and implementation complexity. Our study indicates that the majority of the CFI techniques are primarily focused on restricting indirect branch instructions and cannot prevent all forms of vulnerability exploitation. We conclude that the performance overhead introduced, jointly with the partial attack coverage, is discouraging the industry from adopting most of them.

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