Control Flow Integrity is one technique for addressing these sorts of attacks: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2005/11/ccs05.pdf ht

Control Flow Integrity is one technique for addressing these sorts of attacks: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2005/11/ccs05.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... IIRC there are even some experimental efforts to add hardware support for CFI techniques to new processors (Intel I think?) but there's work going on to add support for it to modern compilers, which would allow you to compile libc and other system libraries with it turned on. EDIT: It appears Clang actually ships with some CFI support already: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ControlFlowIntegrity.html https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ControlFlowIntegrity.html