R.C. Sekar and colleagues at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, are working on self-defense tools to help computers protect themselves from common types of cyber attacks. The most common cyber attacks exploit application errors to burrow into a computer’s memory. To deflect these precision strikes, the Stony Brook team developed “smoke screen” that confuses and misdirects the memory attacks, dramatically reducing their effectiveness. The smoke screen has been applied to several common server applications, which the lab uses and has made available for download. According to Sekar, they expect to eventually provide tools to add the so-called “address obfuscation” technique to any application.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
3:58 PM
