Securing Embedded System from Code Reuse Attacks: A Lightweight Scheme with Hardware Assistance.

Area of Science:

• Computer Engineering
• Cybersecurity
• Embedded Systems

Background:

• Embedded systems face increasing threats from malicious code reuse attacks.
• Existing security solutions often incur significant performance and implementation overhead.
• There is a critical need for efficient security mechanisms tailored for resource-constrained embedded environments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a lightweight hardware-assisted scheme to enhance embedded system security against code reuse attacks.
• To develop and integrate a hardware shadow stack and data encryption for robust defense.
• To evaluate the performance and overhead of the proposed security solution.

Main Methods:

• Developed an on-chip hardware shadow stack for runtime validation of return addresses, ensuring backward-edge control flow integrity.
• Designed a lightweight stream cipher circuit for encrypting and decrypting critical stack data, preventing tampering.
• Integrated the hardware components into the OR1200 processor and validated on an FPGA platform.

Main Results:

• The proposed scheme effectively defends against code reuse attacks in embedded systems.
• Achieved an average system performance overhead of only 0.39%.
• Demonstrated a minimal area footprint of 0.316 mm².

Conclusions:

• The lightweight hardware-assisted scheme offers a dedicated and efficient defense against code reuse attacks for embedded systems.
• The solution balances security enhancement with the resource and performance constraints of embedded platforms.
• Successful integration and validation on FPGA confirm the practical applicability of the proposed security mechanism.