NDLI: Hardware-Assisted Fine-Grained Control-Flow Integrity: Towards Efficient Protection of Embedded Systems Against Software Exploitation

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Davi, Lucas Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza Koeberl, Patrick
Abstract	Embedded systems have become pervasive and are built into a vast number of devices such as sensors, vehicles, mobile and wearable devices. However, due to resource constraints, they fail to provide sufficient security, and are particularly vulnerable to runtime attacks (code injection and ROP). Previous works have proposed the enforcement of control-flow integrity (CFI) as a general defense against runtime attacks. However, existing solutions either suffer from performance overhead or only enforce coarse-grain CFI policies that a sophisticated adversary can undermine. In this paper, we tackle these limitations and present the design of novel security hardware mechanisms to enable fine-grained CFI checks. Our CFI proposal is based on a state model and a per-function CFI label approach. In particular, our CFI policies ensure that function returns can only transfer control to active call sides (i.e., return landing pads of functions currently executing). Further, we restrict indirect calls to target the beginning of a function, and lastly, deploy behavioral heuristics for indirect jumps.
Starting Page	1
Ending Page	6
Page Count	6
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781450327305
DOI	10.1145/2593069.2596656
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2014-06-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
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Hardware-Assisted Fine-Grained Control-Flow Integrity: Towards Efficient Protection of Embedded Systems Against Software Exploitation