Foiling cyberattackers with rerandomization
When it comes to protecting data from cyberattacks, information technology (IT) specialists who defend computer networks face attackers armed with some advantages. For one, while attackers need only find one vulnerability in a system to gain network access and disrupt, corrupt, or steal data, the IT personnel must constantly guard against and work to mitigate varied and myriad network intrusion attempts. The homogeneity and uniformity of software applications have traditionally created another advantage for cyber attackers. "Attackers can develop a single exploit against a software application and use it to compromise millions of instances of that application because all instances look alike internally," says Hamed Okhravi, a senior staff member in the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. To counter this problem, cybersecurity practitioners have implemented randomization techniques in operating systems. These techniques, notably address space layout randomization (ASLR), diversify the memory locations used by each instance...