MemoryTrap - Booby Trapping Memory to Counter Memory Disclosure Attacks with Hardware Support

Learn about a novel hardware-assisted security technique in this 15-minute conference presentation from USENIX ATC '25. Discover how MemoryTrap addresses the critical vulnerability of memory disclosure attacks, particularly just-in-time return-oriented programming (JIT-ROP) attacks that exploit code-reuse vulnerabilities by harvesting executable code gadgets in real-time. Explore the limitations of existing countermeasures like execute-only memory and destructive code reads, which either remain vulnerable to code inference attacks or restrict the fundamental von Neumann architecture principle of mixing code and data. Understand how MemoryTrap innovatively places unreadable "booby traps" throughout programs at compile time, leveraging Intel's Memory Protection Keys hardware feature to provide efficient memory permission control that immediately detects and halts attacks when adversaries encounter these traps during memory disclosure attempts. Examine the comprehensive security evaluation demonstrating MemoryTrap's effectiveness against real JIT-ROP attacks and synthetic code inference attacks, while maintaining negligible runtime overhead across both microbenchmarks and macrobenchmarks. Gain insights into how this technique successfully hardens applications, shared libraries, and dynamically generated JIT code without compromising the essential architectural flexibility of modern computing systems.