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Buffer overflow attack with multiple fault injection and a proven countermeasure

  • Special Section on Proofs 2015
  • Published:
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Abstract

In this paper, we present a hardware/software co-attack to hijack a program flow on microcontrollers. The basic idea is to skip a few instructions using multiple fault injection in microcontrollers in cooperation with a software attack. We focus on buffer overflow (BOF) attacks together with such multiple fault injection. The proposed attack can be applied to a program code with a typical software countermeasure against BOF attacks. The attack manipulates the program control flow by skipping specific instructions related to the countermeasure, and thus, the subsequent BOF attack code is successfully executed on the microcontroller. We show the effectiveness of our proposed attack through experiments using an 8-bit AVR ATmega163 microcontroller and a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, where the target software was equipped with a countermeasure limiting the size of user input against BOF attacks. The result showed that our attack can overwrite a return address stored in a stack and call an arbitrary malicious function. We also propose a software countermeasure against our attack and prove its validity by examining all the possible instruction skips.

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Acknowledgments

This work has mainly been done when Shoei Nashimoto had been in Tohoku University. This work has been supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Nos. 25240006 and 16K12436.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Technology R&D Center, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, 5-1-1, Ofuna, Kamakura City, 247-8501, Japan

    Shoei Nashimoto

  2. Tohoku University, 6-6-05, Aramaki Aza Aoba, Aoba-ku, Sendai-shi, Miyagi, 980-8579, Japan

    Naofumi Homma, Yu-ichi Hayashi & Takafumi Aoki

  3. NTT Secure Platform Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, 3-9-11 Midori-cho, Musashino-shi, Tokyo, 180-8585, Japan

    Junko Takahashi & Hitoshi Fuji

Authors
  1. Shoei Nashimoto
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  2. Naofumi Homma
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  3. Yu-ichi Hayashi
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  4. Junko Takahashi
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  5. Hitoshi Fuji
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  6. Takafumi Aoki
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Correspondence to Shoei Nashimoto.

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Nashimoto, S., Homma, N., Hayashi, Yi. et al. Buffer overflow attack with multiple fault injection and a proven countermeasure. J Cryptogr Eng 7, 35–46 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13389-016-0136-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13389-016-0136-3

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