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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Demo #14: In-Vehicle Communication Using Named Data Networking

Zachariah Threet (Tennessee Tech), Christos Papadopoulos (University of Memphis), Proyash Poddar (Florida International University), Alex Afanasyev (Florida International University), William Lambert (Tennessee Tech), Haley Burnell (Tennessee Tech), Sheikh Ghafoor (Tennessee Tech) and Susmit Shannigrahi (Tennessee Tech)

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Packet-Level Open-World App Fingerprinting on Wireless Traffic

Jianfeng Li (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Shuohan Wu (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Hao Zhou (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Xiapu Luo (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Ting Wang (Penn State), Yangyang Liu (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Xiaobo Ma (Xi'an Jiaotong University)

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ProvTalk: Towards Interpretable Multi-level Provenance Analysis in Networking Functions...

Azadeh Tabiban (CIISE, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada), Heyang Zhao (CIISE, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada), Yosr Jarraya (Ericsson Security Research, Ericsson Canada, Montreal, QC, Canada), Makan Pourzandi (Ericsson Security Research, Ericsson Canada, Montreal, QC, Canada), Mengyuan Zhang (Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China), Lingyu Wang (CIISE, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada)

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A Framework for Consistent and Repeatable Controller Area Network...

Paul Agbaje (University of Texas at Arlington), Afia Anjum (University of Texas at Arlington), Arkajyoti Mitra (University of Texas at Arlington), Gedare Bloom (University of Colorado Colorado Springs) and Habeeb Olufowobi (University of Texas at Arlington)

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