SSRC Seminar Series - Georgios Christou

Title:

Preventing Code Reuse Attacks in RISC-V architecture.

Abstract:

Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is a popular technique to defend against State-of-the-Art exploits, by ensuring that every (indirect) control-flow transfer points to a legitimate address and it is part of the Control-flow Graph (CFG) of a program. In this work, we explore the implementation of a full-featured CFI-enabled Instruction Set Extension tailored to RISC-V. Our new instructions provide the finest possible granularity for both intra-function and inter-function Control-Flow Integrity.

Bio:

George Christou received his BSc and MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Crete in 2014 and 2017 respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department of University of Crete under the supervision of Prof. Sotiris Ioannidis. He has been an undergraduate researcher in the Institute of Computer Science of Foundation Of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) in the Distributed Computing Laboratory from 2013 to 2014. Since 2014 he is a graduate researcher in the aforementioned laboratory. Since October 2021 he is the Chair of the Control-Flow Integrity Special Interest Group in RISC-V Foundation. His research interests are in the area of hardware-assisted security, systems security and secure hardware.