README

General
=======

  Over the past decade, a wide range of exploit mitigation techniques has been
introduced to defend against memory corruption attacks. W^X, ASLR, and
canary-based protections are nowadays widely deployed and considered standard
practice. However, despite the fact that these techniques have evolved over
time, they still suffer from limitations that enable skilled adversaries to
bypass them.

  DynaGuard is an extension to canary-based protections that further armors
hardened applications against the byte-by-byte discovery of (stack) canaries
in forking programs. DynaGuard is available in two flavors: a compiler-based
one, operating at the source code level, and a dynamic binary
instrumentation-based one that protects binary-only applications without
requiring access to source code.

  For a detailed description of DynaGuard, please refer to the following paper:

  "DynaGuard: Armoring Canary-based Protections against Brute-force Attacks."
  In Proc. of the 2015 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC).


Installation
============

  For further details on installing (and running) the DBI- or compiler-based
version of DynaGuard, please refer to the respective README file in the
dynaguard_pin/ or dynaguard_gcc/ directory.