LO-FAT: Low-Overhead Control Flow ATtestation in Hardware

Attacks targeting software on embedded systems are becoming increasingly prevalent. Remote attestation is a mechanism that allows establishing trust in embedded devices. However, existing attestation schemes are either static and cannot detect control-flow attacks, or require instrumentation of software incurring high performance overheads. To overcome these limitations, we present LO-FAT, the first practical hardware-based approach to control-flow attestation. By leveraging existing processor hardware features and commonly-used IP blocks, our approach enables efficient control-flow attestation without requiring software instrumentation. We show that our proof-of-concept implementation based on a RISC-V SoC incurs no processor stalls and requires reasonable area overhead.Comment: Authors' pre-print version to appear in DAC 2017 proceeding

On enhancing the debug architecture of a system-on-chip (SoC) to detect software attacks

International audienceThe prevalent use of systems-on-chip (SoCs) makes them prime targets for software attacks. Proposed security countermeasures monitor software execution in real-time, but are impractical, and require impractical changes to the internal logic of intellectual property (IP) cores. We leverage the software observability provided by the readily available SoC debug architecture to detect attacks without modifying IP cores. We add hardware components to configure the debug architecture for security monitoring, to store a golden software execution model, and to notify a trusted kernel process when an attack is detected. Our evaluations show that the additions do not impact runtime software execution, and incur 9% area and power overheads on a low-cost processor core