Comment by NobodyNada

2 years ago

> Code reuse techniques (ROP, JOP, etc.) aren’t impacted, right?

One thing to note is that system calls can no longer be made from the program's .text section; only from within libc. This is highly important because of ASLR: in order to ROP into a syscall, an attacker must now know where libc is located in the virtual address space. Before this mitigation, an attacker that only knew the address of the program binary could search for a sequence of bytes within the .text section that happened to decode to a syscall instruction, and use that for ROP (code reuse techniques can often access a lot of unexpected instructions by jumping into the middle of a multibyte instruction, due to x86's complex and variable-length instruction encoding).