Publications

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) can increase the cost of exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities. One major weakness of ASLR is that it assumes the secrecy of memory addresses and is thus ineffective in the face of memory disclosure vulnerabilities. Even fine-grained variants of ASLR are shown to be ineffective against...

Moving Target (MT) defenses have been proposed as a gamechanging approach to rebalance the security landscape in favor of the defender. MT techniques make systems less deterministic, less static, and less homogeneous in order to increase the level of effort required to achieve a successful compromise. However, a number of...

User space memory randomization techniques are an emerging field of cyber defensive technology which attempts to protect computing systems by randomizing the layout of memory. Quantitative metrics are needed to evaluate their effectiveness at securing systems against modern adversaries and to compare between randomization technologies. We introduce Effective Entropy, a...

Moving-target (MT) techniques seek to randomize system components to reduce the likelihood of a successful attack, add dynamics to a system to reduce the lifetime of an attack, and diversify otherwise homogeneous collections of systems to limit the damage of a large-scale attack. In this article, we review the five...