Abstract : Offensive and defensive players in the cyber security sphere constantly react to either party’s actions. This reactive approach works well for attackers but can be devastating for defenders. This approach also models the software security patching lifecycle. Patches fix security flaws, but when deployed, can be used to develop malicious exploits.To make exploit generation using patches more resource intensive, we propose inserting deception into software security patches. These ghost patches mislead attackers with deception and fix legitimate flaws in code. An adversary using ghost patches to develop exploits will be forced to use additional resources. We implement a proof of concept for ghost patches and evaluate their impact on program analysis and runtime. We find that these patches have a statistically significant impact on dynamic analysis runtime, increasing time to analyze by a factor of up to 14x, but do not have a statistically significant impact on program runtime.
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01648988 Contributor : Hal IfipConnect in order to contact the contributor Submitted on : Monday, November 27, 2017 - 10:30:57 AM Last modification on : Monday, November 27, 2017 - 10:34:21 AM
Jeffrey Avery, Eugene Spafford. Ghost Patches: Fake Patches for Fake Vulnerabilities. 32th IFIP International Conference on ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (SEC), May 2017, Rome, Italy. pp.399-412, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-58469-0_27⟩. ⟨hal-01648988⟩