Return-Oriented Programming on RISC-V
It addresses security vulnerabilities in RISC-V embedded systems, revealing a novel attack vector that is incremental in extending ROP techniques to a new architecture.
This paper analyzes the feasibility of Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) on RISC-V, demonstrating new gadgets that bypass traditional mitigations like DEP and ASLR, and provides a proof-of-concept attack for privilege escalation on Linux systems.
This paper provides the first analysis on the feasibility of Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) on RISC-V, a new instruction set architecture targeting embedded systems. We show the existence of a new class of gadgets, using several Linear Code Sequences And Jumps (LCSAJ), undetected by current Galileo-based ROP gadget searching tools. We argue that this class of gadgets is rich enough on RISC-V to mount complex ROP attacks, bypassing traditional mitigation like DEP, ASLR, stack canaries, G-Free, as well as some compiler-based backward-edge CFI, by jumping over any guard inserted by a compiler to protect indirect jump instructions. We provide examples of such gadgets, as well as a proof-of-concept ROP chain, using C code injection to leverage a privilege escalation attack on two standard Linux operating systems. Additionally, we discuss some of the required mitigations to prevent such attacks and provide a new ROP gadget finder algorithm that handles this new class of gadgets.