Samuel Mergendahl (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Nathan Burow (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Hamed Okhravi (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)

Memory corruption attacks against unsafe programming languages like C/C++ have been a major threat to computer systems for multiple decades. Various sanitizers and runtime exploit mitigation techniques have been shown to only provide partial protection at best. Recently developed ‘safe’ programming languages such as Rust and Go hold the promise to change this paradigm by preventing memory corruption bugs using a strong type system and proper compile-time and runtime checks. Gradual deployment of these languages has been touted as a way of improving the security of existing applications before entire applications can be developed in safe languages. This is notable in popular applications such as Firefox and Tor. In this paper, we systematically analyze the security of multi-language applications. We show that because language safety checks in safe languages and exploit mitigation techniques applied to unsafe languages (e.g., Control-Flow Integrity) break different stages of an exploit to prevent control hijacking attacks, an attacker can carefully maneuver between the languages to mount a successful attack. In essence, we illustrate that the incompatible set of assumptions made in various languages enables attacks that are not possible in each language alone. We study different variants of these attacks and analyze Firefox to illustrate the feasibility and extent of this problem. Our findings show that gradual deployment of safe programming languages, if not done with extreme care, can indeed be detrimental to security.

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Physical Layer Data Manipulation Attacks on the CAN Bus

Abdullah Zubair Mohammed (Virginia Tech), Yanmao Man (University of Arizona), Ryan Gerdes (Virginia Tech), Ming Li (University of Arizona) and Z. Berkay Celik (Purdue University)

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The Truth Shall Set Thee Free: Enabling Practical Forensic...

Leonardo Babun (Florida International University), Amit Kumar Sikder (Florida International University), Abbas Acar (Florida International University), Selcuk Uluagac (Florida International University)

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FedCRI: Federated Mobile Cyber-Risk Intelligence

Hossein Fereidooni (Technical University of Darmstadt), Alexandra Dmitrienko (University of Wuerzburg), Phillip Rieger (Technical University of Darmstadt), Markus Miettinen (Technical University of Darmstadt), Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Technical University of Darmstadt), Felix Madlener (KOBIL)

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