Georgia Tech researchers have identified a weakness in one of Android's security features and will present their work at Black Hat USA 2014, which will be held August 6-7 in Las Vegas. The research, titled Abusing Performance Optimization¹ Weaknesses to Bypass ASLR, identifies an Android performance feature that weakens a software protection called Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), leaving software components² vulnerable to attacks that bypass the protection. The work is aimed at helping³ security practitioners⁴ identify and understand the future direction of such attacks.

 

The work was conducted at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) by Ph.D. students Byoungyoung Lee and Yeongjin Jang and research scientist Tielei Wang, and reveals that the introduction of performance optimization features can inadvertently（非故意地） harm the security guarantees of an otherwise vetted⁵ system. In addition to describing how vulnerabilities originate from such designs, they demonstrate real attacks that exploit them.

 

"To optimize⁶ object tracking for some programming languages, interpreters for the languages may leak address information," said Lee, lead researcher for the effort. "As a concrete example, we'll demonstrate how address information can be leaked in the Safari⁷ web browser⁸ by simply running some JavaScript."

 

Bypassing ASLR using hash table leaks was previously⁹ believed to be obsolete¹⁰ due to its complexity¹¹. By exhaustively investigating various language implementations and presenting concrete attacks, the research aims to show that the concern is still valid¹².

 

"As part of our talk, we'll present an analysis of the Android Zygote process creation model," Lee said. "The results show that Zygote weakens ASLR as all applications are created with largely identical memory layouts. To highlight the issue, we'll show two different ASLR bypass attacks using real applications -- Google Chrome and VLC Media Player."

 

The Black Hat Briefings were created approximately 16 years ago to provide computer security professionals a place to learn the very latest in information security risks, research and trends. Presented by the brightest in the industry, the briefings cover everything from critical information infrastructure¹³ to widely used enterprise computer systems to the latest InfoSec research and development. These briefings are vendor-neutral, allowing the presenters¹⁴ to speak candidly¹⁵（坦白地） about the real problems and potential solutions across both the public and private sectors¹⁶.

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