Summary: On Protection by Layout Randomization
Mart´in Abadi
Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley and
University of California, Santa Cruz
Gordon Plotkin
Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley and
LFCS, University of Edinburgh
Abstract--Layout randomization is a powerful, popular tech-
nique for software protection. We present it and study it in
programming-language terms. More specifically, we consider
layout randomization as part of an implementation for a high-
level programming language; the implementation translates
this language to a lower-level language in which memory
addresses are numbers. We analyze this implementation, by re-
lating low-level attacks against the implementation to contexts
in the high-level programming language, and by establishing
full abstraction results.
I. INTRODUCTION
Several techniques for protection are based on random-
ization (e.g., [6­9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 24, 31]). The randomization

Source: Abadi, Martín - Department of Computer Science, University of California at Santa Cruz
Plotkin, Gordon - School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences