Research Spotlight: ROPMEMU – A Framework for the Analysis of Complex Code Reuse Attacks

The post was authored by Mariano Graziano.

Executive Summary

Attacks have grown more and more complex over the years. The evolution of the threat landscape has demonstrated this where adversaries have had to modify their tactics to bypass mitigations and compromise systems in response to better mitigations. Code-reuse attacks, such as return-oriented programming (ROP), are part of this evolution and currently present a challenge to defenders as it is an area of research that has not been studied in depth. Today, Talos releases ROPMEMU, a framework to analyze complex code-reuse attacks. In this blog post, we will identify and discuss the challenges and importance of reverse engineering these code-reuse instances. We will also present the techniques and the components of the framework to dissect these attacks and simplify analysis.

Code-reuse attacks are not new or novel. They’ve been around since 1997 when the first ret2libc attack was demonstrated. Since then, adversaries have been moving towards code-reuse attacks as code injection scenarios have gotten much more difficult to successfully leverage due to the increasing number of software and hardware mitigations. Improved defenses have resulted in more complex attacks being developed to bypass them. In recent years, malware writers have also started to adopt return-oriented programming (ROP) paradigms to hide malicious functionality and hinder analysis. For readers who are not familiar with ROP and want to learn more, we invite you to please read Shacham’s formulation.

Unfortunately, the analysis of code reuse attacks, such as ROP, has been completely overlooked. While there are a small number of publicly available examples that demonstrate how complex these attacks can be, the trend is clear that adversaries will continue to leverage these types of attacks in the future. For defenders, the general lack of tooling available to help dissect these threats was one of the primary motivations for developing ROPMEMU.