Extended Protection against Stack Smashing Attacks without Performance Loss

In this paper we present an efficient countermeasure against stack smashing attacks. Our countermeasure does not rely on secret values (such as canaries) and protects against attacks that are not addressed by state-of-the-art countermeasures. Our technique splits the standard stack into multiple stacks. The allocation of data types to one of the stacks is based on the chances that a specific data element is either a target of attacks and/or an attack vector. We have implemented our solution in a C-compiler for Linux. The evaluation shows that the overhead of using our countermeasure is negligible