Type of Publication: Article in Collected Edition

LO-FAT: Low-Overhead Control Flow ATtestation in Hardware

Author(s):

Dessouky, Ghada; Zeitouni, Shaza; Nyman, Thomas; Paverd, Andrew; Davi, Lucas; Koeberl, Patrick; Asokan, N.; Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza

Title of Anthology:

Proc. of 54th Design Automation Conference (DAC)

Publication Date:

2017

Link to complete version:

https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N674141

Citation:

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Abstract

Attacks targeting software on embedded systems are becoming increasingly prevalent. Remote attestation is a mechanism that allows establishing trust in embedded devices. However, existing attestation schemes are either static and cannot detect control-flow attacks, or require instrumentation of software incurring high performance overheads. To overcome these limitations, we present LO-FAT, the first practical hardware-based approach to control-flow attestation. By leveraging existing processor hardware features and commonly-used IP blocks, our approach enables efficient control-flow attestation without requiring software instrumentation. We show that our proof-of-concept implementation based on a RISC-V SoC incurs no processor stalls and requires reasonable area overhead.