A Survey of Exploitation Techniques and Defenses for Program Data Attacks

In recent years, program data attacks (PDA) have become a popular topic in the field of network security. PDAs are memory corruption vulnerability exploitation techniques that target the control plane and data plane in the target program without injecting any code. We divide PDAs into return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks and data-oriented programming (DOP) attacks, and pioneering research has shown that PDAs are Turing-complete. However, although PDAs have been known for a long time, their threats have not been adequately addressed. In this survey, we followed a systematic research method to introduce a series of statistical analyses of a corpus of publications; then, we systematized the current knowledge on PDA exploits and effective defence mechanisms. Methods have been classified according to the approach that they follow and we have identified three protection approaches: L1 defence, L2 defence and L3 defence. This systematization suggests that stronger policies are needed, especially protection methods against DOP attacks. Furthermore, the summarization of current techniques shows that performance and compatibility problems are the main barriers to widespread adoption. We remind researchers in the security community to recognize the significance of these properties in the real world and hope that this systematization of knowledge will help them find new solutions to make progress in this area.