Publication Date

2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Committee Members

Nikolaos Bourbakis, Ph.D. (Advisor); Soon Chung, Ph.D. (Committee Member); Bin Wang, Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sukarno Mertoguno, Ph.D. (Committee Member)

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Abstract

As we become more and more dependent on computer networks, using them for everything from banking and investing to shopping and communicating, computer security has emerged to be an increasingly important concern, due to undesirable cyber-security attacks. Thus, in response to this issue many efforts have been made towards accurate and robust computer security protection; however, the general problem is very challenging, diverse and ever-changing and remains still open. In this PhD dissertation we offer protection on one of these cyber-security attacks, the memory-based attacks, caused by one of the most critical software errors according to the MITRE ranking. When these attacks are successfully exploited by a malicious intruder, they can impose a very serious threat on a computer system and its information. This problem is examined from many perspectives in this thesis. In particular, we firstly present an extensive survey of security methodologies that deal with this type of attacks and propose a maturity metric to evaluate them. Next, we present our key contribution; AMYNA is our security generator and performance estimator framework that automatically: (i) produces a reliable execution time estimation of a software program when protected by multiple security methodologies and (ii) selects the combination of security methodologies that best matches one's security and performance criteria. Finally, we focus on Control Flow Hijacking and Data-Only attacks and propose a novel security technique, called EDIFT, which can accurately and deterministically detect and thwart them.

Page Count

174

Department or Program

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Year Degree Awarded

2014

Download


Share

COinS