Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Shishir Sharma

Ten H Tzen

Terry Jack Mahaffey

Ankit Asthana

Systems and methods for the mitigation of return-oriented programming are disclosed. A return address for a function is encrypted to generate an encrypted return address. The encrypted return address is stored as the return address for the function. The encrypted return address can be decrypted prior to a return instruction of the function.

Return-oriented programming mitigation

Profile guided optimization (PGO) in the presence of stale profile data as described herein can be based on path profiling, whereby different paths through a program's call graph are uniquely identified. Stale profile data is data collected in a training run of a previous version of the program. Profile data can be collected along these paths and optimization decisions can be made using the collected data. The paths can be numbered using an algorithm that assigns path increments to all the callees of a function. The path increment assignments (which can be stored in the profile database) can be used to locate the profile data for that path and to make corresponding optimization decisions. PGO optimizations along call graph paths involving edited functions can be performed.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Shishir Sharma