Libsafe: transparent system-wide protection against buffer overflow attacks

Abstract

Libsafe is a practical solution that protects against the most common forms of buffer overflow attacks. Such attacks often result in granting the attacker full privileges on the target system. Libsafe is implemented as a shared library that intercepts calls to vulnerable standard library functions. Based on an inspection of the process stack and the function arguments, Libsafe ensures that no return addresses can be overwritten, thus preventing the most common form of buffer overflow attack.