Enlisting hardware architecture to thwart malicious code injection

Software vulnerabilities that enable the injection and execution of malicious code in pervasive Internet-connected computing devices pose serious threats to cyber security. In a common type of attack, a hostile party induces a software buffer overflow in a susceptible computing device in order to corrupt a procedure return address and transfer control to malicious code. These buffer overflow attacks are often employed to recruit oblivious hosts into distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack networks, which ultimately launch devastating DDoS attacks against victim networks or machines. In spite of existing software countermeasures that seek to prevent buffer overflow exploits, many systems remain vulnerable.