Compiler-assisted architectural support for program code integrity monitoring in application-specific instruction set processors

Abstract

(ASIPs) are being increasingly used in mobile embedded systems, the ubiquitous networking connections have exposed these systems under various malicious security attacks, which may alter the program code running on the systems. In addition, soft errors in microprocessors can also change program code and result in system malfunction. 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 ASIPs, where both the instruction set architecture (ISA) and the underlying microarchitecture can be customized for a particular application domain. Based on the microoperation-based monitoring architecture that we have presented in previous work, we propose a compiler-assisted and application-controlled management approach for the monitoring architecture. Experimental results show that compared with the OS-managed scheme and other compiler-assisted schemes, our approach can detect program code integrity compromises with much less performance degradation.