Hardware-Assisted System for Program Execution Security of SOC

School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

Abstract

With the rapid development of embedded systems, the systems’ security has become more and more important. Most embedded systems are at the risk of series of software attacks, such as buffer overflow attack, Trojan virus. In addition, with the rapid growth in the number of embedded systems and wide application, followed embedded hardware attacks are also increasing. This paper presents a new hardware assisted security mechanism to protect the program’s code and data, monitoring its normal execution. The mechanism mainly monitors three types of information: the start/end address of the program of basic blocks; the lightweight hash value in basic blocks and address of the next basic block. These parameters are extracted through additional tools running on PC. The information will be stored in the security module. During normal program execution, the security module is designed to compare the real-time state of program with the information in the security module. If abnormal, it will trigger the appropriate security response, suspend the program and jump to the specified location. The module has been tested and validated on the SOPC with OR1200 processor. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed mechanism can defence a wide range of common software and physical attacks with low performance penalties and minimal overheads.