[brynet]

"ROP attack methods are impacted because existing gadgets are transformed to consist of '<gadget artifacts> <mangle ret address> RET'. That pivots the return sequence off the ROP chain in a highly unpredictable and inconvenient fashion."

[jacquesgt]

I'm not seeing how it's unpredictable and inconvenient. It's predictable if the stack address can be leaked (via a frame pointer leak, for example). It doesn't seem that inconvenient. Instead of including the address of a gadget in the chain, include the gadget xor the leaked stack address. What's the unpredictable and inconvenient part that I'm not seeing?

[Mordak]

You have it - if a stack address can be leaked, and you can follow the control flow to figure out the difference between the address you leaked and the address you're going to be dumping your ROP chain into, then you can just xor the gadget address with the stack address, and then do the math to xor any down-chain gadgets with the calculated stack address if the gadgets you want to use happen to have this xor instruction injected into them.

But you don't always have stack address leaks. Presently, in order to ROP you need (a) a leaked address to the space where your gadgets live and (b) the ability to write your ROP chain somewhere where the program will return into it. With this scheme, you now also need (c) the exact address where you are writing your ROP chain.

Not all info leak vulnerabilities leak arbitrary memory of the attacker's choosing. If they did, stack canaries would be pretty useless. So for those cases where a stack address leak is unavailable, this raises the bar against ROP.