Architectural Enhancement and System Software Support for Program Code Integrity Monitoring in Application-Specific Instruction-

12 years 11 months ago

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Program code in a computer system can be altered either by malicious security attacks or by various faults in microprocessors. At the instruction level, all code modifications are manifested as bit flips. In this work, we present a generalized methodology for monitoring code integrity at run-time in application-specific instruction set processors (ASIPs), where both the instruction set architecture (ISA) and the underlying microarchitecture can be customized for a particular application domain. We embed monitoring microoperations in machine instructions, thus the processor is augmented with a hardware monitor automatically. The monitor observes the processor's execution trace at runtime, checks whether it aligns with the expected program behavior, and signals any mismatches. Since the monitor works at a level below the instructions, the monitoring mechanism can not be bypassed by software or compromised by malicious users. We discuss the ability and limitation of such monitoring m...

Hai Lin, Yunsi Fei, Xuan Guan, Zhijie Jerry Shi

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