Practical Software-Based Shadow Stacks on x86-64
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) techniques focus often on protecting forward edges and assume that backward edges are protected by shadow stacks. However, software-based shadow stacks that can provide performance, security, and compatibility are still hard to obtain, leaving an important security gap on x86-64. In this article, we introduce a simple, efficient, and effective parallel shadow stack design (based on LLVM), FlashStack , for protecting return addresses in single- and multi-threaded programs running under 64-bit Linux on x86-64, with three distinctive features. First, we introduce a novel dual-prologue approach to enable a protected function to thwart the TOCTTOU attacks, which are constructed by Microsoft’s red team and lead to the deprecation of Microsoft’s RFG. Second, we design a new mapping mechanism, Segment+Rsp-S , to allow the parallel shadow stack to be accessed efficiently while satisfying the constraints of arch_prctl() and ASLR in 64-bit Linux. Finally, we introduce a lightweight inspection mechanism, SideChannel-K , to harden FlashStack further by detecting entropy-reduction attacks efficiently and protecting the parallel shadow stack effectively with a 10-ms shuffling policy. Our evaluation on SPEC CPU2006 , Nginx, and Firefox shows that FlashStack can provide high performance, meaningful security, and reasonable compatibility for server- and client-side programs on x86-64.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".