Pythia: Compiler-Guided Defense Against Non-Control Data Attacks

Modern C/C++ applications are susceptible to Non-Control Data Attacks, where an adversary attempts to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities for security breaches such as privilege escalation, control-flow manipulation, etc. One such popular class of non-control data attacks is Control-flow Bending, where the attacker manipulates the program data to flip branch outcomes, and divert the program control flow into alternative paths to gain privileges. Unfortunately, despite tremendous advancements in software security, state-of-art defense mechanisms such as Control-flow Integrity (CFI), are ineffective against control-flow bending attacks especially those involving flipping of branch predicates.