Enhancing security through hardware-assisted run-time validation of program data properties

The growing number of information security breaches in electronic and computing systems calls for new design paradigms that consider security as a primary design objective. This is particularly relevant in the embedded domain, where the security solution should be customized to the needs of the target system, while considering other design objectives such as cost, performance, and power. Due to the increasing complexity and shrinking design cycles of embedded software, most embedded systems present a host of software vulnerabilities that can be exploited by security attacks. Many attacks are initiated by causing a violation in the properties of data (e.g., integrity, privacy, access control rules, etc.) associated with a "trusted" program that is executing on the system, leading to a range of undesirable effects. In this work, we develop a general framework that provides security assurance against a wide class of security attacks. Our work is based on the observation that a program's permissible behavior with respect to data accesses can be characterized by certain properties. We present a hardware/software approach wherein such properties can be encoded as data attributes and enforced as security policies during program execution. These policies may be application-specific (e.g., access control for certain data structures), compiler-generated (e.g., enforcing that variables are accessed only within their scope), or universally applicable to all programs (e.g., disallowing writes to unallocated memory). We show how an embedded system architecture can support, such policies by (i) enhancing the memory hierarchy to represent the attributes of each datum as security tags that are linked to it through its lifetime, and (ii) adding a configurable hardware checker that interprets the semantics of the tags and enforces the desired security policies. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed architecture in enforcing various security policies for several embedded benchmarks. Our experiments in the context of the Simplescalar framework demonstrate that the proposed solution ensures run-time validation of program data properties with minimal execution time overheads.