MITIGATING ROP ATTACKS

Mitigating return-oriented programming attacks. From program code and associated components needed by the program code for execution, machine language instruction sequences that may be combined and executed as malicious code are selected. A predetermined number of additional copies of each of the selected machine language instruction sequences are made, and the additional copies are marked as non-executable. The machine language instruction sequences and the non-executable copies are distributed in memory. If a process attempts to execute a machine language instruction sequence that has been marked non-executable, the computer may initiate protective action.