Are Harvard architecture computers immune to arbitrary code injection and execution attacks? - security

Harvard architecture computers have separate code and data memories. Does this make them immune to code injection attacks (as data cannot be executed as code)?


They are somewhat more immune than Von Neumann architecture, but not entirely. Every architecture has a conversion point, where data starts being treated as code. In Von Neumann it happens immediately inside CPU, while in Harvard it happens before the memory is reserved and declared for the module (or sometimes even before that, when a file is being prepared by the build system). This means that in Harvard architecture a successful code injection attack needs to be a bit more complicated and far-fetching, but not necessarily impossible.
If one can place a file containing malicious code in the machine's storage (e.g. file system) and cause, say, a buffer overrun which would redirect on return to existing (valid, non-malicious) code which loads this malicious file as code and if the architecture allows this file to start executing (e.g. via self-initialization routine), that'll be an example of successful code injection.


It partly depends on what you count as a "code injection attack".
Take a SQL injection attack, for example. The SQL query itself would never need to be in an executable part of memory, because it's converted into native code (or interpreted, or whatever terminology you wish to use) by the database engine. However, that SQL could still be broadly regarded as "code".
If you only include an attacker inserting native code to be executed directly by the processor (e.g. via a buffer overrun), and if the process is prevented from copying data into a "code area", then it provides protection against this sort of attack, yes. (I'm reluctant to claim 100% protection even if I can't think of any attack vectors; it sounds foolproof, but security's a tricky business.)


Apparently, there are some researchers who were able to accomplish a permanent code injection attack on a Harvard architecture. So maybe not as secure as people thought.


Most Harvard architecture machines still use a common shared memory space for both data and instructions outside of the core. So, it would still be possible to inject code and get it executed as instructions. In fact, most processors today are internally Harvard architecture, even if they look Von Neumann externally.


My university had a MS defense recently that discussed this very thing. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend. I'm sure if you contacted Mr. Watts he'd be willing to discuss it.
http://www.cs.uidaho.edu/Defenses/KrisWatts.html


x86 has a segmentation architecture that does this, and it has been used by some projects to try to stop data from being executed as code (an effort which is now mostly wasted given the NX bit), and it never came close to stemming the flow of new exploits. Consider the amazing number of remote file inclusions still exploitable in the wild.

Related

What protection menchanism are used to protect binaries from decompilation in commercial software?

I'm wondering to what extend one can get source code from binaries and what can be done to protect it's content. Especially I'm interested if expensive commercial software like e.g. CAD systems or ERP systems use such protection.
I know that decompilation can give you assembler code and from that you can get an idea of what e.g. C or C++ code looks like. I also know that there will be no function or variable names, hence data structures will look very different.
But are additional protection mechanism applied to expensive software?

You won't be able to do much with the disassembled code of any application, so only important stuff that's worth to hid gets some protection effort.
That can be reduced to:
Algorithms (Even though many algorithms come from academy research, you don't want your competition to know which one you're using).
DRM enforcement related code.
Embedded devices, were you don't deal with consumer piracy, but with hardware clones.
Malware and backdoors.
If you control in some way the hardware using the code (like with UEFI chain of trust, or with embedded devices) to some extent you may control how the code is used. In that case, encryption of the code is an alternative, where the keys are stored somewhere of difficult access on the hardware.
Otherwise, the only deterrent you have is code obfuscation.

Why is return-to-libc much earlier than return-to-user?

I'm really new to this topic and only know some basic concepts. Nevertheless, there is a question that quite confuses me.
Solar Designer proposed the idea of return-to-libc in 1997 (http://seclists.org/bugtraq/1997/Aug/63). Return-to-user, from my understanding, didn't become popular until 2007 (http://seclists.org/dailydave/2007/q1/224).
However, return-to-user seems much easier than return-to-libc. So my question is, why did hackers spend so much effort in building a gadget chain by using libc, rather than simply using their own code in the user space when exploiting a kernel vulnerability?
I don't believe that they did not realize there are NULL pointer dereference vulnerabilities in the kernel.

Great question and thank you for taking some time to research the topic before making a post that causes it's readers to lose hope in the future of mankind (you might be able to tell I've read a few [exploit] tags tonight)
Anyway, there are two reasons
return-to-libc is generic, provided you have the offsets. There is no need to programmatically or manually build either a return chain or scrape existing user functionality.
Partially because of linker-enabled relocations and partly because of history, the executable runtime of most programs executing on a Linux system essentially demand the libc runtime, or at least a runtime that can correctly handle _start and cons. This formula still stands on Windows, just under the slightly different paradigm of return-to-kernel32/oleaut/etc but can actually be more immediately powerful, particularly for shellcode with length requirements, for reasons relating to the way in which system calls are invoked indirectly by kernel32-SSDT functions
As a side-note, If you are discussing NULL pointer dereferences in the kernel, you may be confusing return to vDSO space, which is actually subject to a different set of constraints that standard "mprotect and roll" userland does not.

Ret2libc or ROP is a technique you deploy when you cannot return to your shellcode (jmp esp/whatever) because of memory protections (DEP/NX).

They perform different goals, and you may engage with both.
Return to libc
This is a buffer overrun exploit where you have control over some input, and you know there exists a badly written program which will copy your input onto the stack and return through it. This allows you to start executing code on a machine you have not got a login to, or a very restrictive access.
Return to libc gives you the ability to control what code is executed, and would generally result in you running within the space, a more natural piece of code.
return from kernel
This is a privilege escalation attack. It takes code which is running on the machine, and exploits bugs in the kernel causing the kernel privileges to be applied to the user process.
Thus you may use return-to-libc to get your code running in a web-browser, and then return-to-user to perform restricted tasks.
Earlier shellcode
Before return-to-libc, there was straight shellcode, where the buffer overrun included the exploit code, with knowledge about where the stack would be, this was possible to run directly. This became somewhat obsolete with the NX bit in windows. (x86 hardware was capable of having execute on a segment, but not a page).
Why is return-to-libc much earlier than return-to-user?
The goal in these attacks is to own the machine, frequently, it was easy to find a vulnerability in a user-mode process which gave you access to what you needed, it is only with the hardening of the system by reducing the privilege at the boundary, and fixing the bugs in important programs, that the new return-from-kernel became necessary.

How to Protect an Exe File from Decompilation

What are the methods for protecting an Exe file from Reverse Engineering.Many Packers are available to pack an exe file.Such an approach is mentioned in http://c-madeeasy.blogspot.com/2011/07/protecting-your-c-programexe-files-from.html
Is this method efficient?

The only good way to prevent a program from being reverse-engineered ("understood") is to revise its structure to essentially force the opponent into understanding Turing Machines. Essentially what you do is:
take some problem which generally proven to be computationally difficult
synthesize a version of that whose outcome you know; this is generally pretty easy compared to solving a version
make the correct program execution dependent on the correct answer
make the program compute nonsense if the answer is not correct
Now an opponent staring at your code has to figure what the "correct" computation is, by solving algorithmically hard problems. There's tons of NP-hard problems that nobody has solved efficiently in the literature in 40 years; its a pretty good bet if your program depends on one of these, that J. Random Reverse-Engineer won't suddenly be able to solve them.
One generally does this by transforming the original program to obscure its control flow, and/or its dataflow. Some techniques scramble the control flow by converting some control flow into essentially data flow ("jump indirect through this pointer array"), and then implementing data flow algorithms that require precise points-to analysis, which is both provably hard and has proven difficult in practice.
Here's a paper that describes a variety of techniques rather shallowly but its an easy read:
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/stamp/students/kundu_deepti.pdf
Here's another that focuses on how to ensure that the obfuscating transformations lead to results that are gauranteed to be computationally hard:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/41135jkqxv9l3xme/
Here's one that surveys a wide variety of control flow transformation methods,
including those that provide levels of gaurantees about security:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g157gxr14m149l13/
This paper obfuscates control flows in binary programs with low overhead:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.167.3773&rank=2
Now, one could go through a lot of trouble to prevent a program from being decompiled. But if the decompiled one was impossible to understand, you simply might not bother; that's the approach I'd take.
If you insist on preventing decompilation, you can attack that by considering what decompilation is intended to accomplish. Decompilation essentially proposes that you can convert each byte of the target program into some piece of code. One way to make that fail, is to ensure that the application can apparently use each byte
as both computer instructions, and as data, even if if does not actually do so, and that the decision to do so is obfuscated by the above kinds of methods. One variation on this is to have lots of conditional branches in the code that are in fact unconditional (using control flow obfuscation methods); the other side of the branch falls into nonsense code that looks valid but branches to crazy places in the existing code. Another variant on this idea is to implement your program as an obfuscated interpreter, and implement the actual functionality as a set of interpreted data.
A fun way to make this fail is to generate code at run time and execute it on the fly; most conventional languages such as C have pretty much no way to represent this.
A program built like this would be difficult to decompile, let alone understand after the fact.
Tools that are claimed to a good job at protecting binary code are listed at:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/1069/any-comprehensive-solutions-for-binary-code-protection-and-anti-reverse-engineeri

Packing, compressing and any other methods of binary protection will only every serve to hinder or slow reversal of your code, they have never been and never will be 100% secure solutions (though the marketing of some would have you believe that). You basically need to evaluate what sort of level of hacker you are up against, if they are script kids, then any packer that require real effort and skill (ie:those that lack unpacking scripts/programs/tutorials) will deter them. If your facing people with skills and resources, then you can forget about keeping your code safe (as many of the comments say: if the OS can read it to execute it, so can you, it'll just take a while longer). If your concern is not so much your IP but rather the security of something your program does, then you might be better served in redesigning in a manner where it cannot be attack even with the original source (chrome takes this approach).

Decompilation is always possible. The statement
This threat can be eliminated to extend by packing/compressing the
executable(.exe).
on your linked site is a plain lie.

Currently many solutions can be used to protect your application from being anti-compiled. Such as compressing, Obfuscation, Code snippet, etc.
You can looking for a company to help you achieve this.
Such as Nelpeiron, the website is:https://www.nalpeiron.com/
Which can cover many platforms, Windows, Linux, ARM-Linux, Android.
What is more Virbox is also can be taken into consideration:
The website is: https://lm-global.virbox.com/index.html
I recommend is because they have more options to protect your source code, such as import table protection, memory check.

does a disaster proof language exist?

When creating system services which must have a high reliability, I often end up writing the a lot of 'failsafe' mechanisms in case of things like: communications which are gone (for instance communication with the DB), what would happen if the power is lost and the service restarts.... how to pick up the pieces and continue in a correct way (and remembering that while picking up the pieces the power could go out again...), etc etc
I can imagine for not too complex systems, a language which would cater for this would be very practical. So a language which would remember it's state at any given moment, no matter if the power gets cut off, and continues where it left off.
Does this exist yet? If so, where can I find it? If not, why can't this be realized? It would seem to me very handy for critical systems.
p.s. In case the DB connection is lost, it would signal that a problem arose, and manual intervention is needed. The moment he connection is restored, it would continue where it left off.
EDIT:
Since the discussion seems to have died off let me add a few points(while waiting before I can add a bounty to the question)
The Erlang response seems to be top rated right now. I'm aware of Erlang and have read the pragmatic book by Armstrong (the principal creator). It's all very nice (although functional languages make my head spin with all the recursion), but the 'fault tolerant' bit doesn't come automatically. Far from it. Erlang offers a lot of supervisors en other methodologies to supervise a process, and restart it if necessary. However, to properly make something which works with these structures, you need to be quite the erlang guru, and need to make your software fit all these frameworks. Also, if the power drops, the programmer too has to pick up the pieces and try to recover the next time the program restarts
What I'm searching is something far simpler:
Imagine a language (as simple as PHP for instance), where you can do things like do DB queries, act on it, perform file manipulations, perform folder manipulations, etc.
It's main feature however should be: If the power dies, and the thing restarts it takes of where it left off (So it not only remembers where it was, it will remember the variable states as well). Also, if it stopped in the middle of a filecopy, it will also properly resume. etc etc.
Last but not least, if the DB connection drops and can't be restored, the language just halts, and signals (syslog perhaps) for human intervention, and then carries on where it left off.
A language like this would make a lot of services programming a lot easier.
EDIT:
It seems (judging by all the comments and answers) that such a system doesn't exist. And probably will not in the near foreseeable future due to it being (near?) impossible to get right.
Too bad.... again I'm not looking for this language (or framework) to get me to the moon, or use it to monitor someones heartrate. But for small periodic services/tasks which always end up having loads of code handling bordercases (powerfailure somewhere in the middle, connections dropping and not coming back up),...where a pause here,...fix the issues,....and continue where you left off approach would work well.
(or a checkpoint approach as one of the commenters pointed out (like in a videogame). Set a checkpoint.... and if the program dies, restart here the next time.)
Bounty awarded:
At the last possible minute when everyone was coming to the conclusion it can't be done, Stephen C comes with napier88 which seems to have the attributes I was looking for.
Although it is an experimental language, it does prove it can be done and it is a something which is worth investigating more.
I'll be looking at creating my own framework (with persistent state and snapshots perhaps) to add the features I'm looking for in .Net or another VM.
Everyone thanks for the input and the great insights.

Erlang was designed for use in Telecommunication systems, where high-rel is fundamental. I think they have standard methodology for building sets of communicating processes in which failures can be gracefully handled.
ERLANG is a concurrent functional language, well suited for distributed, highly concurrent and fault-tolerant software. An important part of Erlang is its support for failure recovery. Fault tolerance is provided by organising the processes of an ERLANG application into tree structures. In these structures, parent processes monitor failures of their children and are responsible for their restart.

Software Transactional Memory (STM) combined with nonvolatile RAM would probably satisfy the OP's revised question.
STM is a technique for implementating "transactions", e.g., sets of actions that are done effectively as an atomic operation, or not at all. Normally the purpose of STM is to enable highly parallel programs to interact over shared resources in a way which is easier to understand than traditional lock-that-resource programming, and has arguably lower overhead by virtue of having a highly optimistic lock-free style of programming.
The fundamental idea is simple: all reads and writes inside a "transaction" block are recorded (somehow!); if any two threads conflict on the these sets (read-write or write-write conflicts) at the end of either of their transactions, one is chosen as the winner and proceeds, and the other is forced to roll back his state to the beginning of the transaction and re-execute.
If one insisted that all computations were transactions, and the state at the beginning(/end) of each transaction was stored in nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM), a power fail could be treated as a transaction failure resulting in a "rollback". Computations would proceed only from transacted states in a reliable way. NVRAM these days can be implemented with Flash memory or with battery backup. One might need a LOT of NVRAM, as programs have a lot of state (see minicomputer story at end). Alternatively, committed state changes could be written to log files that were written to disk; this is the standard method used by most databases and by reliable filesystems.
The current question with STM is, how expensive is it to keep track of the potential transaction conflicts? If implementing STM slows the machine down by an appreciable amount, people will live with existing slightly unreliable schemes rather than give up that performance. So far the story isn't good, but then the research is early.
People haven't generally designed languages for STM; for research purposes, they've mostly
enhanced Java with STM (see Communications of ACM article in June? of this year). I hear MS has an experimental version of C#. Intel has an experimental version for C and C++.
THe wikipedia page has a long list. And the functional programming guys
are, as usual, claiming that the side-effect free property of functional programs makes STM relatively trivial to implement in functional languages.
If I recall correctly, back in the 70s there was considerable early work in distributed operating systems, in which processes (code+state) could travel trivally from machine to machine. I believe several such systems explicitly allowed node failure, and could restart a process in a failed node from save state in another node. Early key work was on the
Distributed Computing System by Dave Farber. Because designing languages back in the 70s was popular, I recall DCS had it had its own programming language but I don't remember the name. If DCS didn't allow node failure and restart, I'm fairly sure the follow on research systems did.
EDIT: A 1996 system which appears on first glance to have the properties you desire is
documented here.
Its concept of atomic transactions is consistent with the ideas behind STM.
(Goes to prove there isn't a lot new under the sun).
A side note: Back in in 70s, Core Memory was still king. Core, being magnetic, was nonvolatile across power fails, and many minicomputers (and I'm sure the mainframes) had power fail interrupts that notified the software some milliseconds ahead of loss of power. Using that, one could easily store the register state of the machine and shut it down completely. When power was restored, control would return to a state-restoring point, and the software could proceed. Many programs could thus survive power blinks and reliably restart. I personally built a time-sharing system on a Data General Nova minicomputer; you could actually have it running 16 teletypes full blast, take a power hit, and come back up and restart all the teletypes as if nothing happened. The change from cacophony to silence and back was stunning, I know, I had to repeat it many times to debug the power-failure management code, and it of course made great demo (yank the plug, deathly silence, plug back in...). The name of the language that did this, was of course Assembler :-}

From what I know¹, Ada is often used in safety critical (failsafe) systems.
Ada was originally targeted at
embedded and real-time systems.
Notable features of Ada include:
strong typing, modularity mechanisms
(packages), run-time checking,
parallel processing (tasks), exception
handling, and generics. Ada 95 added
support for object-oriented
programming, including dynamic
dispatch.
Ada supports run-time checks in order
to protect against access to
unallocated memory, buffer overflow
errors, off-by-one errors, array
access errors, and other detectable
bugs. These checks can be disabled in
the interest of runtime efficiency,
but can often be compiled efficiently.
It also includes facilities to help
program verification.
For these
reasons, Ada is widely used in
critical systems, where any anomaly
might lead to very serious
consequences, i.e., accidental death
or injury. Examples of systems where
Ada is used include avionics, weapon
systems (including thermonuclear
weapons), and spacecraft.
N-Version programming may also give you some helpful background reading.
¹That's basically one acquaintance who writes embedded safety critical software

I doubt that the language features you are describing are possible to achieve.
And the reason for that is that it would be very hard to define common and general failure modes and how to recover from them. Think for a second about your sample application - some website with some logic and database access. And lets say we have a language that can detect power shutdown and subsequent restart, and somehow recover from it. The problem is that it is impossible to know for the language how to recover.
Let's say your app is an online blog application. In that case it might be enough to just continue from the point we failed and all be ok. However consider similar scenario for an online bank. Suddenly it's no longer smart to just continue from the same point. For example if I was trying to withdraw some money from my account, and the computer died right after the checks but before it performed the withdrawal, and it then goes back one week later it will give me the money even though my account is in the negative now.
In other words, there is no single correct recovery strategy, so this is not something that can be implemented into the language. What language can do is to tell you when something bad happens - but most languages already support that with exception handling mechanisms. The rest is up to application designers to think about.
There are a lot of technologies that allow designing fault tolerant applications. Database transactions, durable message queues, clustering, hardware hot swapping and so on and on. But it all depends on concrete requirements and how much the end user is willing to pay for it all.

There is an experimental language called Napier88 that (in theory) has some attributes of being disaster-proof. The language supports Orthogonal Persistence, and in some implementations this extends (extended) to include the state of the entire computation. Specifically, when the Napier88 runtime system check-pointed a running application to the persistent store, the current thread state would be included in the checkpoint. If the application then crashed and you restarted it in the right way, you could resume the computation from the checkpoint.
Unfortunately, there are a number of hard issues that need to be addressed before this kind of technology is ready for mainstream use. These include figuring out how to support multi-threading in the context of orthogonal persistence, figuring out how to allow multiple processes share a persistent store, and scalable garbage collection of persistent stores.
And there is the problem of doing Orthogonal Persistence in a mainstream language. There have been attempts to do OP in Java, including one that was done by people associated with Sun (the Pjama project), but there is nothing active at the moment. The JDO / Hibernate approaches are more favoured these days.
I should point out that Orthogonal Persistence isn't really disaster-proof in the large sense. For instance, it cannot deal with:
reestablishment of connections, etc with "outside" systems after a restart,
application bugs that cause corruption of persisted data, or
loss of data due to something bringing down the system between checkpoints.
For those, I don't believe there are general solutions that would be practical.

The majority of such efforts - termed 'fault tolerance' - are around the hardware, not the software.
The extreme example of this is Tandem, whose 'nonstop' machines have complete redundancy.
Implementing fault tolerance at a hardware level is attractive because a software stack is typically made from components sourced from different providers - your high availability software application might be installed along side some decidedly shaky other applications and services on top of an operating system that is flaky and using hardware device drivers that are decidedly fragile..
But at a language level, almost all languages offer the facilities for proper error checking. However, even with RAII, exceptions, constraints and transactions, these code-paths are rarely tested correctly and rarely tested together in multiple-failure scenerios, and its usually in the error handling code that the bugs hide. So its more about programmer understanding, discipline and trade-offs than about the languages themselves.
Which brings us back to the fault tolerance at the hardware level. If you can avoid your database link failing, you can avoid exercising the dodgy error handling code in the applications.

No, a disaster-proof language does not exist.
Edit:
Disaster-proof implies perfection. It brings to mind images of a process which applies some intelligence to resolve unknown, unspecified and unexpected conditions in a logical manner. There is no manner by which a programming language can do this. If you, as the programmer, can not figure out how your program is going to fail and how to recover from it then your program isn't going to be able to do so either.
Disaster from an IT perspective can arise in so many fashions that no one process can resolve all of those different issues. The idea that you could design a language to address all of the ways in which something could go wrong is just incorrect. Due to the abstraction from the hardware many problems don't even make much sense to address with a programming language; yet they are still 'disasters'.
Of course, once you start limiting the scope of the problem; then we can begin talking about developing a solution to it. So, when we stop talking about being disaster-proof and start speaking about recovering from unexpected power surges it becomes much easier to develop a programming language to address that concern even when, perhaps, it doesn't make much sense to handle that issue at such a high level of the stack. However, I will venture a prediction that once you scope this down to realistic implementations it becomes uninteresting as a language since it has become so specific. i.e. Use my scripting language to run batch processes overnight that will recover from unexpected power surges and lost network connections (with some human assistance); this is not a compelling business case to my mind.
Please don't misunderstand me. There are some excellent suggestions within this thread but to my mind they do not rise to anything even remotely approaching disaster-proof.

Consider a system built from non-volatile memory. The program state is persisted at all times, and should the processor stop for any length of time, it will resume at the point it left when it restarts. Therefore, your program is 'disaster proof' to the extent that it can survive a power failure.
This is entirely possible, as other posts have outlined when talking about Software Transactional Memory, and 'fault tolerance' etc. Curious nobody mentioned 'memristors', as they would offer a future architecture with these properties and one that is perhaps not completely von Neumann architecture too.
Now imagine a system built from two such discrete systems - for a straightforward illustration, one is a database server and the other an application server for an online banking website.
Should one pause, what does the other do? How does it handle the sudden unavailability of it's co-worker?
It could be handled at the language level, but that would mean lots of error handling and such, and that's tricky code to get right. That's pretty much no better than where we are today, where machines are not check-pointed but the languages try and detect problems and ask the programmer to deal with them.
It could pause too - at the hardware level they could be tied together, such that from a power perspective they are one system. But that's hardly a good idea; better availability would come from a fault-tolerant architecture with backup systems and such.
Or we could use persistant message queues between the two machines. However, at some point these messages get processed, and they could at that point be too old! Only application logic can really work what to do in that circumstances, and there we are back to languages delegating to the programmer again.
So it seems that the disaster-proofing is better in the current form - uninterrupted power supplies, hot backup servers ready to go, multiple network routes between hosts, etc. And then we only have to hope that our software is bug-free!

Precise answer:
Ada and SPARK were designed for maximum fault-tolerance and to move all bugs possible to compile-time rather than runtime. Ada was designed by the US Dept of Defense for military and aviation systems, running on embedded devices in such things as airplanes. Spark is its descendant. There's another language used in the early US space program, HAL/S geared to handling HARDWARE failure and memory corruption due to cosmic rays.
Practical answer:
I've never met anyone who can code Ada/Spark. For most users the best answer is SQL variants on a DBMS with automatic failover and clustering of servers. Integrity checks guarantee safety. Something like T-SQL or PL/SQL has full transactional security, is Turing-complete, and is pretty tolerant of problems.
Reason there isn't a better answer:
For performance reasons, you can't provide durability for every program operation. If you did, the processing would slow to the speed of your fastest nonvolative storage. At best, your performance will drop by a thousand or million fold, because of how much slower ANYTHING is than CPU caches or RAM.
It would be the equivalent of going from a Core 2 Duo CPU to the ancient 8086 CPU -- at most you could do a couple hundred operations per second. Except, this would be even SLOWER.
In cases where frequent power cycling or hardware failures exist, you use something like a DBMS, which guarantees ACID for every important operation. Or, you use hardware that has fast, nonvolatile storage (flash, for example) -- this is still much slower, but if the processing is simple, this is OK.
At best your language gives you good compile-time safety checks for bugs, and will throw exceptions rather than crashing. Exception handling is a feature of half the languages in use now.

There are several commercially avaible frameworks Veritas, Sun's HA , IBMs HACMP etc. etc.
which will automatically monitor processes and start them on another server in event of failure.
There is also expensive hardware like HPs Tandem Nonstop range which can survive internal hardware failures.
However sofware is built by peoples and peoples love to get it wrong. Consider the cautionary tale of the IEFBR14 program shipped with IBMs MVS. It basically a NOP dummy program which allows the declarative bits of JCL to happen without really running a program. This is the entire original source code:-
IEFBR14 START
BR 14 Return addr in R14 -- branch at it
END
Nothing code be simpler? During its long life this program has actually acummulated a bug bug report and is now on version 4.
Thats 1 bug to three lines of code, the current version is four times the size of the original.
Errors will always creep in, just make sure you can recover from them.

This question forced me to post this text
(Its quoted from HGTTG from Douglas Adams:)
Click, hum.
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and Silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the problem .
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table .
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software — agents — surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite.
The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would have enabled it to see the hole, with them.
The ship tried to think intelligently about this, failed, and then blanked out completely for a bit. It didn't realise it had blanked out, of course, because it had blanked out. It was merely surprised to see the stars jump. After the third time the stars jumped the ship finally realised that it must be blanking out, and that it was time to take some serious decisions.
It relaxed.
Then it realised it hadn't actually taken the serious decisions yet and panicked. It blanked out again for a bit. When it awoke again it sealed all the bulkheads around where it knew the unseen hole must be.
It clearly hadn't got to its destination yet, it thought, fitfully, but since it no longer had the faintest idea where its destination was or how to reach it, there seemed to be little point in continuing. It consulted what tiny scraps of instructions it could reconstruct from the tatters of its central mission module.
"Your !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! year mission is to !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, land !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! a safe distance !!!!! !!!!! ..... ..... ..... .... , land ..... ..... ..... monitor it. !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!..."
All of the rest was complete garbage.
Before it blanked out for good the ship would have to pass on those instructions, such as they were, to its more primitive subsidiary systems.
It must also revive all of its crew.
There was another problem. While the crew was in hibernation, the minds of all of its members, their memories, their identities and their understanding of what they had come to do, had all been transferred into the ship's central mission module for safe keeping. The crew would not have the faintest idea of who they were or what they were doing there. Oh well.
Just before it blanked out for the final time, the ship realised that its engines were beginning to give out too.
The ship and its revived and confused crew coasted on under the control of its subsidiary automatic systems, which simply looked to land wherever they could find to land and monitor whatever they could find to monitor.

Try taking an existing open source interpreted language and see if you could adapt its implementation to include some of these features. Python's default C implementation embeds an internal lock (called the GIL, Global Interpreter Lock) that is used to "handle" concurrency among Python threads by taking turns every 'n' VM instructions. Perhaps you could hook into this same mechanism to checkpoint the code state.

For a program to continue where it left off if the machine loses power, not only would it need to save state to somewhere, the OS would also have to "know" to resume it.
I suppose implementing a "hibernate" feature in a language could be done, but having that happen constantly in the background so it's ready in the event anything bad happens sounds like the OS' job, in my opinion.

It's main feature however should be: If the power dies, and the thing restarts it takes of where it left off (So it not only remembers where it was, it will remember the variable states as well). Also, if it stopped in the middle of a filecopy, it will also properly resume. etc etc.
... ...
I've looked at erlang in the past. However nice it's fault tolerant features it has... It doesn't survive a powercut. When the code restarts you'll have to pick up the pieces
If such a technology existed, I'd be VERY interested in reading about it. That said, The Erlang solution would be having multiple nodes--ideally in different locations--so that if one location went down, the other nodes could pick up the slack. If all of your nodes were in the same location and on the same power source (not a very good idea for distributed systems), then you'd be out of luck as you mentioned in a comment follow-up.

The Microsoft Robotics Group has introduced a set of libraries that appear to be applicable to your question.
What is Concurrency and Coordination
Runtime (CCR)?
Concurrency and Coordination Runtime
(CCR) provides a highly concurrent
programming model based on
message-passing with powerful
orchestration primitives enabling
coordination of data and work without
the use of manual threading, locks,
semaphores, etc. CCR addresses the
need of multi-core and concurrent
applications by providing a
programming model that facilitates
managing asynchronous operations,
dealing with concurrency, exploiting
parallel hardware and handling partial
failure.
What is Decentralized Software
Services (DSS)?
Decentralized Software Services (DSS)
provides a lightweight, state-oriented
service model that combines
representational state transfer (REST)
with a formalized composition and
event notification architecture
enabling a system-level approach to
building applications. In DSS,
services are exposed as resources
which are accessible both
programmatically and for UI
manipulation. By integrating service
composition, structured state
manipulation, and event notification
with data isolation, DSS provides a
uniform model for writing highly
observable, loosely coupled
applications running on a single node
or across the network.
Most of the answers given are general purpose languages. You may want to look into more specialized languages that are used in embedded devices. The robot is a good example to think about. What would you want and/or expect a robot to do when it recovered from a power failure?

In the embedded world, this can be implemented through a watchdog interrupt and a battery-backed RAM. I've written such myself.

Depending upon your definition of a disaster, it can range from 'difficult' to 'practicly impossible' to delegate this responsibility to the language.
Other examples given include persisting the current state of the application to NVRAM after each statement is executed. This only works so long as the computer doesn't get destroyed.
How would a language level feature know to restart the application on a new host?
And in the situation of restoring the application to a host - what if significant time had passed and assumptions/checks made previously were now invalid?
T-SQL, PL/SQL and other transactional languages are probably as close as you'll get to 'disaster proof' - they either succeed (and the data is saved), or they don't. Excluding disabling transactional isolation, it's difficult (but probably not impossible if you really try hard) to get into 'unknown' states.
You can use techniques like SQL Mirroring to ensure that writes are saved in atleast two locations concurrently before a transaction is committed.
You still need to ensure you save your state every time it's safe (commit).

If I understand your question correctly, I think that you are asking whether it's possible to guarantee that a particular algorithm (that is, a program plus any recovery options provided by the environment) will complete (after any arbitrary number of recoveries/restarts).
If this is correct, then I would refer you to the halting problem:
Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input.
I think that classifying your question as an instance of the halting problem is fair considering that you would ideally like the language to be "disaster proof" -- that is, imparting a "perfectness" to any flawed program or chaotic environment.
This classification reduces any combination of environment, language, and program down to "program and a finite input".
If you agree with me, then you'll be disappointed to read that the halting problem is undecidable. Therefore, no "disaster proof" language or compiler or environment could be proven to be so.
However, it is entirely reasonable to design a language that provides recovery options for various common problems.

In the case of power failure.. sounds like to me: "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"
You don't solve power failure problems within a program. You solve this problem with backup power supplies, batteries, etc.

If the mode of failure is limited to hardware failure, VMware Fault Tolerance claims similar thing that you want. It runs a pair of virtual machines across multiple clusters, and using what they call vLockstep, the primary vm sends all states to the secondary vm real-time, so in case of primary failure, the execution transparently flips to the secondary.
My guess is that this wouldn't help communication failure, which is more common than hardware failure. For serious high availability, you should consider distributed systems like Birman's process group approach (paper in pdf format, or book Reliable Distributed Systems: Technologies, Web Services, and Applications ).

The closest approximation appears to be SQL. It's not really a language issue though; it's mostly a VM issue. I could imagine a Java VM with these properties; implementing it would be another matter.
A quick&dirty approximation is achieved by application checkpointing. You lose the "die at any moment" property, but it's pretty close.

I think its a fundemental mistake for recovery not to be a salient design issue. Punting responsibility exclusivly to the environment leads to a generally brittle solution intolerant of internal faults.
If it were me I would invest in reliable hardware AND design the software in a way that it was able to recover automatically from any possible condition. Per your example database session maintenance should be handled automatically by a sufficiently high level API. If you have to manually reconnect you are likely using the wrong API.
As others have pointed out procedure languages embedded in modern RDBMS systems are the best you are going to get without use of an exotic language.
VMs in general are designed for this sort of thing. You could use a VM vendors (vmware..et al) API to control periodic checkpointing within your application as appropriate.
VMWare in particular has a replay feature (Enhanced Execution Record) which records EVERYTHING and allows point in time playback. Obviously there is a massive performance hit with this approach but it would meet the requirements. I would just make sure your disk drives have a battery backed write cache.
You would most likely be able to find similiar solutions for java bytecode run inside a java virtual machine. Google fault tolerant JVM and virtual machine checkpointing.

If you do want the program information saved, where would you save it?
It would need to be saved e.g. to disk. But this wouldn't help you if the disk failed, so already it's not disaster-proof.
You are only going to get a certain level of granularity in your saved state. If you want something like tihs, then probably the best approach is to define your granularity level, in terms of what constitutes an atomic operation and save state to the database before each atomic operation. Then, you can restore to the point of that level atomic operation.
I don't know of any language that would do this automatically, sincethe cost of saving state to secondary storage is extremely high. Therefore, there is a tradeoff between level of granularity and efficiency, which would be hard to define in an arbitrary application.

First, implement a fault tolerant application. One where, where, if you have 8 features and 5 failure modes, you have done the analysis and test to demonstrate that all 40 combinations work as intended (and as desired by the specific customer: no two will likely agree).
second, add a scripting language on top of the supported set of fault-tolerant features. It needs to be as near to stateless as possible, so almost certainly something non-Turing-complete.
finally, work out how to handle restoration and repair of scripting language state adapted to each failure mode.
And yes, this is pretty much rocket science.

Windows Workflow Foundation may solve your problem. It's .Net based and is designed graphically as a workflow with states and actions.
It allows for persistence to the database (either automatically or when prompted). You could do this between states/actions. This Serialises the entire instance of your workflow into the database. It will be rehydrated and execution will continue when any of a number of conditions is met (certain time, rehydrated programatically, event fires, etc...)
When a WWF host starts, it checks the persistence DB and rehydrates any workflows stored there. It then continues to execute from the point of persistence.
Even if you don't want to use the workflow aspects, you can probably still just use the persistence service.
As long as your steps were atomic this should be sufficient - especially since I'm guessing you have a UPS so could monitor for UPS events and force persistence if a power issue is detected.

If I were going about solving your problem, I would write a daemon (probably in C) that did all database interaction in transactions so you won't get any bad data inserted if it gets interrupted. Then have the system start this daemon at startup.
Obviously developing web stuff in C is quite slower than doing it in a scripting language, but it will perform better and be more stable (if you write good code of course :).
Realistically, I'd write it in Ruby (or PHP or whatever) and have something like Delayed Job (or cron or whatever scheduler) run it every so often because I wouldn't need stuff updating ever clock cycle.
Hope that makes sense.

To my mind, the concept of failure recover is, most of the time, a business problem, not a hardware or language problem.
Take an example : you have one UI Tier and one subsystem.
The subsystem is not very reliable but the client on the UI tier should percieve it as if it was.
Now, imagine that somehow your sub system crash, do you really think that the language you imagine, can think for you how to handle the UI Tier depending on this sub system ?
Your user should be explicitly aware that the subsystem is not reliable, if you use messaging to provide high reliability, the client MUST know that (if he isn't aware, the UI can just freeze waiting a response which can eventually come 2 weeks later). If he should be aware of this, this means that any abstrations to hide it will eventually leak.
By client, I mean end user. And the UI should reflect this unreliability and not hide it, a computer cannot think for you in that case.

"So a language which would remember it's state at any given moment, no matter if the power gets cut off, and continues where it left off."
"continues where it left off" is often not the correct recovery strategy. No language or environment in the world is going to attempt to guess how to recover from a particular fault automatically. The best it can do is provide you with tools to write your own recovery strategy in a way that doesn't interfere with your business logic, e.g.
Exception handling (to fail fast and still ensure consistency of state)
Transactions (to roll back incompleted changes)
Workflows (to define recovery routines that are called automatically)
Logging (for tracking down the cause of a fault)
AOP/dependency injection (to avoid having to manually insert code to do all the above)
These are very generic tools and are available in lots of languages and environments.

What are some advanced and modern resources on exploit writing?

I've read and finished both Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering and Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. They both were illuminating in their own way but I still feel like a lot of the techniques and information presented within them is outdated to some degree.
When the infamous Phrack Article, Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit, was written 1996 it was just before what I sort of consider the Computer Security "golden age".
Writing exploits in the years that followed was relatively easy. Some basic knowledge in C and Assembly was all that was required to perform buffer overflows and execute some arbitrary shell code on a victims machine.
To put it lightly, things have gotten a lot more complicated. Now security engineers have to contend with things like Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Stack Cookies, Heap Cookies, and much more. The complexity of writing exploits went up at least an order of magnitude.
You can't event run most of the buffer overrun exploits in the tutorials you'll find today without compiling with a bunch of flags to turn off modern protections.
Now if you want to write an exploit you have to devise ways to turn off DEP, spray the heap with your shell-code hundreds of times and attempt to guess a random memory location near your shellcode. Not to mention the pervasiveness of managed languages in use today that are much more secure when it comes to these vulnerabilities.
I'm looking to extend my security knowledge beyond writing toy-exploits for a decade old system. I'm having trouble locating resources that help address the issues of writing exploits in the face of all the protections I outlined above.
What are the more advanced and prevalent papers, books or other resources devoted to contending with the challenges of writing exploits for modern systems?

You mentioned 'Smashing the stack'. Research-wise this article was out-dated before it was even published. The late 80s Morris worm used it (to exploit fingerd IIRC). At the time it caused a huge stir because back then every server was written in optimistic C.
It took a few (10 or so) years, but gradually everyone became more conscious of security concerns related to public-facing servers.
The servers written in C were subjected to lots of security analysis and at the same time server-side processing branched out into other languages and runtimes.
Today things look a bit different. Servers are not considered a big target. These days it's clients that are the big fish. Hijack a client and the server will allow you to operate under that client's credentials.
The landscape has changed.
Personally I'm a sporadic fan of playing assembly games. I have no practical use for them, but if you want to get in on this I'd recommend checking out the Metasploit source and reading their mailing lists. They do a lot of crazy stuff and it's all out there in the open.

I'm impressed, you are a leet hacker Like me. You need to move to web applications. The majority of CVE numbers issued in the past few years have been in web applications.
Read these two papers:
http://www.securereality.com.au/studyinscarlet.txt
http://www.ngssoftware.com/papers/HackproofingMySQL.pdf
Get a LAMP stack and install these three applications:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvwa/ (php)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gsblogger/ (php)
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebGoat_Project (j2ee)
You should download w3af and master it. Write plugins for it. w3af is an awesome attack platform, but it is buggy and has problems with DVWA, it will rip up greyscale. Acunetix is a good commercial scanner, but it is expensive.

I highly recommend "The Shellcoder's Handbook". It's easily the best reference I've ever read when it comes to writing exploits.
If you're interested writing exploits, you're likely going to have to learn how to reverse engineer. For 99% of the world, this means IDA Pro. In my experience, there's no better IDA Pro book than Chris Eagle's "The IDA Pro Book". He details pretty much everything you'll ever need to do in IDA Pro.
There's a pretty great reverse engineering community at OpenRCE.org. Tons of papers and various helpful apps are available there. I learned about this website at an excellent bi-annual reverse engineering conference called RECon. The next event will be in 2010.
Most research these days will be "low-hanging fruit". The majority of talks at recent security conferences I've been to have been about vulnerabilities on mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, etc) where there are few to none of the protections available on modern OSes.
In general, there won't be a single reference out there that will explain how to write a modern exploit, because there's a whole host of protections built into OSes. For example, say you've found a heap vulnerability, but that pesky new Safe Unlinking feature in Windows is keeping you from gaining execution. You'd have to know that two geniuses researched this feature and found a flaw.
Good luck in your studies. Exploit writing is extremely frustrating, and EXTREMELY rewarding!
Bah! The spam thingy is keeping me from posting all of my links. Sorry!

DEP (Data Execution Prevention), NX (No-Execute) and other security enhancements that specifically disallow execution are easily by-passed by using another exploit techniques such as Ret2Lib or Ret2Esp. When an application is compiled it usually is done so with other libraries (Linux) or DLLs (Windows). These Ret2* techniques simply call an existing function() that resides in memory.
For example, in a normal exploit you may overflow the stack and then take control of the return address (EIP) with the address of a NOP Sled, your Shellcode or an Environmental Variable that contains your shellcode. When attempting this exploit on a system that does not allow the stack to be executable your code will not run. Instead, when you overflow the return address (EIP) you can point it to an existing function within memory such as system() or execv(). You pre populate the required registers with the parameters this function expects and now you can call /bin/sh without having to execute anything from the stack.
For more information look here:
http://web.textfiles.com/hacking/smackthestack.txt

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