Provably-Secure Remote Memory Attestation for Heap Overflow Protection

Memory corruption attacks may lead to complete takeover of systems. There are numerous works offering protection mechanisms for this important problem. But the security guarantees that are offered by most works are only heuristic and, furthermore, most solutions are designed for protecting the local memory. In this paper we initiate the study of provably secure remote memory attestation; we concentrate on provably detecting heap-based overflow attacks and consider the setting where we aim to protect the memory in a remote system. We present two protocols offering various efficiency and security trade-offs (but all solutions are efficient enough for practical use as our implementation shows) that detect the presence of injected malicious code or data in remotely-stored heap memory. While our solutions offer protection only against a specific class of attacks, our novel formalization of threat models is general enough to cover a wide range of attacks and settings.