CWE-121

Mitigation ID: MIT-10

Phases: Operation, Build and Compilation

Strategy: Environment Hardening

Description:

• Use automatic buffer overflow detection mechanisms that are offered by certain compilers or compiler extensions. Examples include: the Microsoft Visual Studio /GS flag, Fedora/Red Hat FORTIFY_SOURCE GCC flag, StackGuard, and ProPolice, which provide various mechanisms including canary-based detection and range/index checking.
• D3-SFCV (Stack Frame Canary Validation) from D3FEND [REF-1334] discusses canary-based detection in detail.

Mitigation

Phase: Architecture and Design

Description:

• Use an abstraction library to abstract away risky APIs. Not a complete solution.

Mitigation

Phase: Implementation

Description:

• Implement and perform bounds checking on input.

Mitigation

Phase: Implementation

Description:

• Do not use dangerous functions such as gets. Use safer, equivalent functions which check for boundary errors.

Mitigation ID: MIT-11

Phases: Operation, Build and Compilation

Strategy: Environment Hardening

Description:

• Run or compile the software using features or extensions that randomly arrange the positions of a program's executable and libraries in memory. Because this makes the addresses unpredictable, it can prevent an attacker from reliably jumping to exploitable code.
• Examples include Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) [REF-58] [REF-60] and Position-Independent Executables (PIE) [REF-64]. Imported modules may be similarly realigned if their default memory addresses conflict with other modules, in a process known as "rebasing" (for Windows) and "prelinking" (for Linux) [REF-1332] using randomly generated addresses. ASLR for libraries cannot be used in conjunction with prelink since it would require relocating the libraries at run-time, defeating the whole purpose of prelinking.
• For more information on these techniques see D3-SAOR (Segment Address Offset Randomization) from D3FEND [REF-1335].