Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Arnautov, Sergei
• Fetzer, Christof

Titel

ControlFreak: Signature Chaining to Counter Control Flow Attacks

Ist Teil von

• 2015 IEEE 34th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), 2015, p.84-93

Ort / Verlag

IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

• IEEE_Xplore

Quelle

IEEE Xplore

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Many modern embedded systems use networks to communicate. This increases the attack surface: the adversary does not need to have physical access to the system and can launch remote attacks. By exploiting software bugs, the attacker might be able to change the behavior of a program. Security violations in safety-critical systems are particularly dangerous since they might lead to catastrophic results. Hence, safety-critical software requires additional protection. We present an approach to detect and prevent control flow attacks. Such attacks maliciously modify program's control flow to achieve the desired behavior. We develop ControlFreak, a hardware watchdog to monitor program execution and to prevent illegal control flow transitions. The watchdog employs chained signatures to detect any modification of the instruction stream and any illegal jump in the program even if signatures are maliciously modified.