CleanStack is a novel stack safety mechanism designed to fight reminiscence corruption assaults, which have lengthy been a major risk to software program programs.
These assaults exploit vulnerabilities in low-level languages like C/C++ to execute arbitrary code or manipulate reminiscence operations.
CleanStack addresses these points by introducing a dual-stack system that isolates and randomizes stack objects influenced by exterior inputs, thereby stopping attackers from modifying return addresses or predicting stack layouts.


Introduction to CleanStack
CleanStack’s strategy is predicated on the Tainted Stack Object Separation (TSOS) concept, which includes figuring out and isolating stack objects that could be tainted by exterior inputs.
That is essential as a result of attackers typically exploit such vulnerabilities to launch control-flow hijacking assaults or non-control information assaults.
By separating tainted stack objects into a definite stack, CleanStack ensures that these objects can’t intervene with the return addresses or different secure stack objects.
Moreover, CleanStack randomizes the position of tainted stack objects throughout the Unclean Stack, making it troublesome for attackers to foretell the stack structure and exploit non-control information assaults.
Implementation and Analysis
CleanStack is carried out throughout the LLVM compiler framework, permitting it to be utilized to a variety of functions.


The implementation includes static evaluation to establish tainted stack objects, that are then relocated to a separate tainted stack.
The structure of this tainted stack undergoes static randomization to disrupt predictable reminiscence layouts.
CleanStack additionally incorporates canary values and runtime checks to reinforce safety additional.
The efficiency and safety of CleanStack have been evaluated utilizing the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark suite and real-world functions just like the Apache HTTP server.
The outcomes present that CleanStack incurs a minimal execution overhead of only one.73% and a reminiscence overhead of 0.04%.
In line with the Report, this makes CleanStack an environment friendly and extremely suitable answer in comparison with current stack safety methods.
It successfully mitigates each control-flow hijacking assaults and non-control information assaults, together with Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) and Knowledge-Oriented Programming (DOP) assaults.
CleanStack’s dual-stack structure and randomization methods present complete safety towards stack-based reminiscence vulnerabilities.
Its means to stability safety protection, runtime overhead, and deployability makes it one of the vital efficient stack safety options obtainable at this time.
By addressing the restrictions of present protection mechanisms, CleanStack presents a strong and environment friendly technique to safe software program programs towards reminiscence corruption assaults.
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