2023-05-30 ◦ ROP Exploits

ROP stands for Return-Oriented Programming. It is primarily used to defeat DEP/NX/W^X (Data Execution Prevention/No Execute/Write xor Execute) mitigations in processors. Different manufacturers have different names for this particular feature, but the idea is to mark certain areas of memory (notably stack and heap) as non-executable. This makes attempts to execute instructions from areas marked as non-executable cause an exeception (SEGFAULT). This mitigates generic buffer overflow attacks, which usually involve writing some shellcode into memory (usually the stack) and overwriting the saved return pointer or some other way to jump to the shellcode and execute it. Since the stack is marked as non-executable, the shellcode is not executed and a SEGFAULT is raised