LinkGuard: A Lightweight State-Aware Runtime Guard Against Link Following Attacks in Windows File System

—Link Following (LF) attacks in the Windows file sys-tem allow adversaries to stealthily redirect benign file operations to protected files by abusing crafted combinations of symbolic links (link chains), thereby enabling arbitrary manipulation of protected files. Such attacks typically manifest as either single-step attacks or multi-step attacks, depending on the sequencing of the constructed link chain. Existing countermeasures against LF attacks either rely on heavyweight modeling or suffer from poor compatibility and limited applicability, and none provide comprehensive protection across different types of LF attacks. In this paper, we present LinkGuard , a lightweight state-aware runtime guard against LF attacks targeting Windows systems. The novelty of LinkGuard lies in its two-stage design: The first stage aims to improve defense efficiency by performing dynamic subject filtering, which monitors only file operations and associated subjects involved in the creation and following of link chains; The second stage applies FSM-based rule matching to precisely defend LF attacks, ensuring effective and accurate defense. We evaluate LinkGuard ’s prototype across five representative Windows systems to validate its compatibility. On a dataset of 70 real-world vulnerabilities, LinkGuard successfully mitigates all single-step attacks and 95.45% of multi-step attacks, with zero false positives on benign operations. On average, LinkGuard only incurs 1% overhead in microbenchmarks and 3.4% overhead in real-world application workloads, while adding a negligible 5 ms latency on benign file operations.