We’re happy to announce that our paper “Analyzing the Gadgets – Towards a Metric to Measure Gadget Quality” has been accepted at ESSoS 2016. In this paper we present four metrics that allow assessing the usefulness of a set of gadgets (short fragments of assembly, which are the cornerstone of ROP exploits). We applied our metrics to binaries compiled with MPX, a new exploit mitigation technique by Intel, that, among other things, transforms binaries to check for buffer overflows. This transformation introduces additional gadgets and, using GaLity, we show, that such a binary contains more gadgets useful in ROP attacks than the same binary compiled without MPX.

GaLity also received the artifact evaluation award.