Algorithms for platform independent return-oriented programming (I of III)
By Tim Kornau

In my last post about the history of return-oriented programming I showed that we are not dealing with a completely new technology when we are talking about return-oriented programming. However, the technology is evolving to a point where even the world of academia thinks it worth discussing it in theoretical conferences. Until recently return-oriented programming has always been platform dependent so that one specific implementation was only able to work on one single platform. To sharpen the point a little further current approaches only target one specific compiler for one platform in general. Even though this is not necessarily the case for variable length instruction sets like the IA-32/64 instruction set, where the search for instruction sequences can be performed without paying attention to the alignment restrictions, for all platforms where alignment is enforced the current approaches are still very limited.