Morpheus: A Vulnerability-Tolerant Secure Architecture Based on Ensembles of Moving Target Defenses with Churn

Mark Gallagher, Lauren Biernacki, Shibo Chen, Zelalem Birhanu Aweke, Salessawi Ferede Yitbarek, Misiker Tadesse Aga, Austin Harris, Zhixing Xu, Baris Kasikci, Valeria Bertacco, Sharad Malik, Mohit Tiwari, Todd Austin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

44 Scopus citations

Abstract

Attacks often succeed by abusing the gap between program and machine-level semantics- for example, by locating a sensitive pointer, exploiting a bug to overwrite this sensitive data, and hijacking the victim program's execution. In this work, we take secure system design on the offensive by continuously obfuscating information that attackers need but normal programs do not use, such as representation of code and pointers or the exact location of code and data. Our secure hardware architecture, Morpheus, combines two powerful protections: Ensembles of moving target defenses and churn. Ensembles of moving target defenses randomize key program values (e.g., relocating pointers and encrypting code and pointers) which forces attackers to extensively probe the system prior to an attack. To ensure attack probes fail, the architecture incorporates churn to transparently rerandomize program values underneath the running system. With frequent churn, systems quickly become impractically difficult to penetrate. We demonstrate Morpheus through a RISC-V-based prototype designed to stop control-flow attacks. Each moving target defense in Morpheus uses hardware support to individually offer more randomness at a lower cost than previous techniques. When ensembled with churn, Morpheus defenses offer strong protection against control-flow attacks, with our security testing and performance studies revealing: I) high-coverage protection for a broad array of control-flow attacks, including protections for advanced attacks and an attack disclosed after the design of Morpheus, and ii) negligible performance impacts (1%) with churn periods up to 50 ms, which our study estimates to be at least 5000x faster than the time necessary to possibly penetrate Morpheus.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationASPLOS 2019 - 24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages469-484
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781450362405
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 4 2019
Event24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2019 - Providence, United States
Duration: Apr 13 2019Apr 17 2019

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems - ASPLOS

Conference

Conference24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityProvidence
Period4/13/194/17/19

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture

Keywords

  • moving target defense
  • runtime randomization

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Morpheus: A Vulnerability-Tolerant Secure Architecture Based on Ensembles of Moving Target Defenses with Churn'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this