DEMIX: Domain-Enforced Memory Isolation for Embedded System

Memory isolation is an essential technology for safeguarding the resources of lightweight embedded systems. This technique isolates system resources by constraining the scope of the processor's accessible memory into distinct units known as domains. Despite the security offered by this approach, the Memory Protection Unit (MPU), the most common memory isolation method provided in most lightweight systems, incurs overheads during domain switching due to the privilege level intervention. However, as IoT environments become increasingly interconnected and more resources become required for protection, the significant overhead associated with domain switching under this constraint is expected to be crucial, making it harder to operate with more granular domains. To mitigate these issues, we propose DEMIX, which supports efficient memory isolation for multiple domains. DEMIX comprises two mainelements-Domain-Enforced Memory Isolation and instruction-level domain isolation-with the primary idea of enabling granular access control for memory by validating the domain state of the processor and the executed instructions. By achieving fine-grained validation of memory regions, our technique safely extends the supported domain capabilities of existing technologies while eliminating the overhead associated with switching between domains. Our implementation of eight user domains shows that our approach yields a hardware overhead of a slight 8% in Ibex Core, a very lightweight RISC-V processor.