  We introduce a novel concept, called Name Confusion, and demonstrate how it
can be employed to thwart multiple classes of code-reuse attacks. By building
upon Name Confusion, we derive Phantom Name System (PNS): a security protocol
that provides multiple names (addresses) to program instructions. Unlike the
conventional model of virtual memory with a one-to-one mapping between
instructions and virtual memory addresses, PNS creates N mappings for the same
instruction, and randomly switches between them at runtime. PNS achieves fast
randomization, at the granularity of basic blocks, which mitigates a class of
attacks known as (just-in-time) code-reuse.
  If an attacker uses a memory safety-related vulnerability to cause any of the
instruction addresses to be different from the one chosen during a fetch, the
exploited program will crash. We quantitatively evaluate how PNS mitigates
real-world code-reuse attacks by reducing the success probability of typical
exploits to approximately $10^{-12}$. We implement PNS and validate it by
running SPEC CPU2017 benchmark suite. We further verify its practicality by
adding it to a RISC-V core on an FPGA. Lastly, PNS is mainly designed for
resource constrained (wimpy) devices and has negligible performance overhead,
compared to commercially-available, state-of-the-art, hardware-based
protections.

Cryptography and Security;Hardware Architecture