Processor Anchor to Increase the Robustness Against Fault Injection and Cyber Attacks

  • Jean Luc Danger
  • , Adrien Facon
  • , Sylvain Guilley
  • , Karine Heydemann
  • , Ulrich Kühne
  • , Abdelmalek Si Merabet
  • , Michaël Timbert
  • , Baptiste Pecatte

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

One major advance in software security would be to use robust processors which could assist the code developer to thwart both cyber and physical attacks. This paper presents a hardware-based solution which increases the security by checking the integrity of executed code on any microcontroller. Unlike other Control Flow Integrity (CFI) protections, this solution does not require modifications of the CPU pipeline, but relies on monitoring the interface between the processor and its instruction cache. The integrity of the execution flow and the instruction sequences (called Basic Blocks) is checked by hardware with precomputed metadata. Another module is dedicated to speed up the access to these metadata. This paper shows the effectiveness of the solution as the impact is as much as 21% in average on the execution time at the price of using memory space to store metadata along with the code.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationConstructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design - 11th International Workshop, COSADE 2020, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsGuido Marco Bertoni, Francesco Regazzoni
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages254-274
Number of pages21
ISBN (Print)9783030687724
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event11th International Workshop on Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design, COSADE 2020 - Lugano, Switzerland
Duration: 1 Apr 20203 Apr 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12244 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference11th International Workshop on Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design, COSADE 2020
Country/TerritorySwitzerland
CityLugano
Period1/04/203/04/20

Keywords

  • Control Flow Graph
  • Control Flow Integrity
  • Cyber Escort Unit (CEU)
  • Fault injection
  • Hardware protection

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