ROP (Return Oriented Programming)

Prerequisite Reading: previous “Stack Pivoting” article

Cyber security seems to be an arms race between attackers and defenders (in addition to the arms race between nations). Every time defenders devise a new mechanism to defend computers and mitigate exploits, attackers seem to find a way around it. Such was the case with DEP (Data Execution Prevention). Defenders used this mechanism to prevent execution from regions of memory that were supposed to contain data only rather than code. This was supposed to prevent attackers from executing shellcode from memory structures such as the program stack or the heap. To bypass DEP, the ROP exploitation technique was devised. It is similar to the idea of Ret2LibC [1].

ROP works by taking advantage of the fact that the attacker can manipulate program execution control data. In this technique, the attacker injects a fake call stack and executes a “stack pivot” (see prerequisite reading) to pivot to it. The call stack can be thought of as recording the causality chain [2] that specifies how execution got to its current position (ie which functions called which functions in order to get to the current function). When returning from the current function, the normal call stack serves the purpose of controlling where the execution will return to. For example with the normal stack, the immediate return address is supposed to be in the function that directly called the currently executing function. Rather than pointing in the functions that are part of the current causality chain, each return address in the fake call stack points to what is known as a “ROP Gadget”.

A ROP Gadget is any “useful instruction(s)” to an attacker followed by a return instruction. The instruction(s) that are considered “useful” depend on the vulnerability the attacker is trying to exploit. The return instruction gets the next value off of the attacker controlled call stack, which in turn points to the next ROP Gadget to be executed. One crucial property of a ROP gadget is that it must be at a predictable address in memory every time the vulnerable program is executed, so the fake call stack can accurately point to the intended ROP gadgets. A stack pivot gadget is a subset of the more general ROP Gadget in that the useful instruction(s) of a stack pivot gadget switches the value of the ESP register from the real stack to the fake stack. Examples of the stack pivot instructions are given in the prerequisite reading. Here are some examples of general ROP gadgets:

• push EAX
  ret
• pop ECX
  ret

• sub EAX, 4
  ret
• pop EBX
  xor EAX, EAX
  ret
• add ECX, 8
  ret

ROP exploits work because the attacker tricks the machine into using attacker controlled program control data which is injected into a page that’s not necessarily executable. This technically is allowed even with DEP enabled because the fake call stack bytes injected by the attacker are technically not being executed. Rather, they are just controlling where execution of the CPU will go next. In some sense, the attacker is actually turning the process’s address space against itself by using instructions already present in executable sections, but just executing them in different orders to achieve the attacker’s intentions. Often the end goal of ROP exploits is to make executable a currently non-executable region in memory, so that shellcode that has been injected into that region can be executed. This requires a return address on the fake call stack to contain a pointer to a function (such as VirtualProtect) along with the required parameters.

The execution of a ROP exploit looks similar to the following once the fake call stack is injected in memory:

1. Execute stack pivot gadget to pass control to the fake call stack
2. Execute a ROP Gadget at the top of the fake callstack
1. Execute “useful instruction(s)"
2. Execute a return instruction
1. If the next return address is another ROP gadget, goes back to step 2.1
2. Else if the next return address is a function, executes that function using parameters that are on the fake stack

Above, step 2.2.1 is implicitly “goto step 2.1” if the return address points to another ROP gadget. This forms a repetitive chain, also known as a “ROP Chain”. A function can be executed if the fake call stack contains the function address and the required parameters (step 2.2.2).

An example of a ROP exploit follows. A local variable buffer on the stack has already been overflowed and the return address of the current stack frame has been overwritten with the address of the below stack pivot gadget. That function has already returned to the stack pivot gadget below and the stack pivot instruction below has already been executed.

Stack Pivot Gadget:

5c   pop ESP    //actual stack pivot instruction (already executed)
c3   ret               //EIP points here. This is the next instruction to be executed

Fake Call Stack:



Fake Call stack right before "ret" instruction of the stack pivot gadget is executed

Above, the ROP exploit is ready to be executed. The ROP exploit leverages a stack based buffer overflow vulnerability (with DEP enabled on the target process) to pop a message box saying “You got pwn3d”, which represents arbitrary code execution. As presented above, the fake call stack has the addresses of various functions to execute, along with arguments to those functions. These steps correspond to 2.2.2 of the ROP execution steps outlined above.

Defenders created DEP to stop shellcode execution from data-only regions of memory. Attackers created ROP to bypass DEP. Then, Defenders created ASLR to stop ROP exploits. And so the cyber security arms race goes on and on…

References:

[1] http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=58&id=4&mode=txt

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj891052.aspx