R&D 100 winner of day: Timely Randomization Applied to Commodity Executables at Runtime (TRACER)

Sophisticated, modern cyberattacks that hijack the control of a machine remotely heavily rely on the static and homogeneous nature of computer systems. Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory developed Timely Randomization Applied to Commodity Executables at Runtime (TRACER), a patented technology to prevent such attacks in closed-source commodity applications running on top of Windows operating system by automatically and transparently randomizing their key internal data and layout. Since vulnerable applications can leak how their internals have been randomized, it is crucial to continuously re-randomize these values. A time-based re-randomization would still be vulnerable because the leakage and the attack can happen within a short period of time. As such, TRACER implements an output-based re-randomization strategy to thwart a potential attacker. With this re-randomization strategy, any information leaked by the application will be stale when attackers attempt to exploit it. TRACER is lightweight, seamless to use and easy to install. It is sold as part of a security suite by Polyverse and is the recipient of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s 2019 Best Invention Award.