Hardware-Based Run-Time Code Integrity in Embedded Devices

• Main Authors: Taimour Wehbe, Vincent Mooney, David Keezer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-08-01
• Series: Cryptography
• Subjects: embedded systems security; hardware-based malware detection; run-time monitoring; code modification; security threats; Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2410-387X/2/3/20

Attacks on embedded devices are becoming more and more prevalent, primarily due to the extensively increasing plethora of software vulnerabilities. One of the most dangerous types of these attacks targets application code at run-time. Techniques to detect such attacks typically rely on software due to the ease of implementation and integration. However, these techniques are still vulnerable to the same attacks due to their software nature. In this work, we present a novel hardware-assisted run-time code integrity checking technique where we aim to detect if executable code resident in memory is modified at run-time by an adversary. Specifically, a hardware monitor is designed and attached to the device’s main memory system. The monitor creates page-based signatures (hashes) of the code running on the system at compile-time and stores them in a secure database. It then checks for the integrity of the code pages at run-time by regenerating the page-based hashes (with data segments zeroed out) and comparing them to the legitimate hashes. The goal is for any modification to the binary of a user-level or kernel-level process that is resident in memory to cause a comparison failure and lead to a kernel interrupt which allows the affected application to halt safely.