Multi-Variant Execution of Parallel Programs

Abstract: Multi-Variant Execution Environments (MVEEs) are a promising technique to protect software against memory corruption attacks. They transparently execute multiple, diversified variants (often referred to as replicae) of the software receiving the same inputs. By enforcing and monitoring the lock-step execution of the replicae's system calls, and by deploying diversity techniques that prevent an attacker from simultaneously compromising multiple replicae, MVEEs can block attacks before they succeed. Existing MVEEs cannot handle non-trivial multi-threaded programs because their undeterministic behavior introduces benign system call inconsistencies in the replicae, which trigger false positive detections and deadlocks in the MVEEs. This paper for the first time extends the generality of MVEEs to protect multi-threaded software by means of secure and efficient synchronization replication agents. On the PARSEC 2.1 parallel benchmarks running with four worker threads, our prototype MVEE incurs a run-time overhead of only 1.32x.