Application Security

Researchers have devised a new attack that can bypass one of the main exploit mitigations in browsers: Address space layout randomization (ASLR). The attack takes advantage of how modern processors cache memory and, because it doesn’t rely on a software bug, fixing the problem is not easy.

Researchers from the Systems and Network Security Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUSec) unveiled the attack, dubbed AnC, Wednesday after having coordinated its disclosure with processor, browser and OS vendors since October.

ASLR is a feature present in all major operating systems. Applications, including browsers, take advantage of it to make the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities like buffer overflows more difficult.

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