C vulnerabilities usually hold verbatim for C++ programs. The counterfeit-object-oriented programming attack demonstrated that this relation is asymmetric, i.e., it only applies to C++. The problem pinpointed by this COOP attack is that C++ does not validate the integrity of its objects. By injecting malicious objects with manipulated virtual function table pointers, attackers can hijack control-flow of programs. The software security community addressed the COOP-problem in the years following its discovery, but together with the emergence of transient-execution attacks, such as Spectre, researchers also shifted their attention.

We present Hobbit, a software-only solution to prevent COOP attacks by validating object integrity for virtual function pointer tables. Hobbit does not require any hardware specific features, scales to multi-million lines of C++ source code, and our LLVM-based implementation offers a configurable performance impact between 121.63% and 2.80% on compute-intensive SPEC CPU C++ benchmarks. Hobbit’s security analysis indicates strong resistance to brute forcing attacks and demonstrates additional benefits of using execute-only memory.