JiuJITsu: Removing Gadgets with Safe Register Allocation for JIT Code Generation

Abstract

Code-reuse attacks have the capability to craft malicious instructions from small code fragments, commonly referred to as “gadgets.” These gadgets are generated by JIT (Just-In-Time) engines as integral components of native instructions, with the flexibility to be embedded in various fields, including Displacement . In this article, we introduce a novel approach for potential gadget insertion, achieved through the manipulation of ModR/M and SIB bytes via JavaScript code. This manipulation influences a JIT engine’s register allocation and code generation algorithms. These newly generated gadgets do not rely on constants and thus evade existing constant blinding schemes. Furthermore, they can be combined with 1-byte constants, a combination that proves to be challenging to defend against using conventional constant blinding techniques. To showcase the feasibility of our approach, we provide proof-of-concept (POC) code for three distinct types of gadgets. Our research underscores the potential for attackers to exploit ModR/M and SIB bytes within JIT-generated native instructions. In response, we propose a practical defense mechanism to mitigate such attacks. We introduce JiuJITsu , a security-enhanced register allocation scheme designed to prevent harmful register assignments during the JIT code generation phase, thereby thwarting the generation of these malicious gadgets. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of JiuJITsu ’s effectiveness in defending against code-reuse attacks. Our findings demonstrate that it incurs a runtime overhead of under 1% when evaluated using JetStream2 benchmarks and real-world websites.