New approach to return-oriented programming exploitation mitigation.

Preventing software exploitation is an incredibly important goal for cyber security professionals, and huge amounts of time, effort, and money are devoted to this cause worldwide. A key stage of the exploitation process is gaining control of the execution flow of a target process so as to redirect it to the attacker’s illicit shellcode; most of the exploit mitigations currently in use are targeted at increasing the difficulty of this act. This article presents a new method for preventing control flow hijacking that provides a more robust defensive posture than existing options and is achieved by dereferencing function and return pointers to evaluate their contents rather than the extant approach of evaluating the pointers themselves.