A Hardware Monitor to Protect Linux System Calls

Internet-connected embedded systems have limited capabilities to defend themselves against remote hacking attacks. The potential effects of such attacks, however, can have a significant impact in the context of the Internet of Things, industrial control systems, smart health systems, etc. Embedded s...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Provelengios, George, Pouraghily, Arman, Tessier, Russell, Wolf, Tilman
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Embedded systems
FPGA
Hardware
hardware monitor
hardware security
Linux
Monitoring
Process control
system call
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Internet-connected embedded systems have limited capabilities to defend themselves against remote hacking attacks. The potential effects of such attacks, however, can have a significant impact in the context of the Internet of Things, industrial control systems, smart health systems, etc. Embedded systems cannot effectively utilize existing software-based protection mechanisms due to limited processing capabilities and energy resources. We propose a novel hardware-based monitoring technique that can detect if the system calls of sophisticated embedded operating systems (e.g. Linux) deviate from the originally programmed behavior due to an attack. We present an FPGA-based prototype implementation that shows the effectiveness of such a security approach using a known Linux exploit. Our approach detects the attack with minimal overhead and without slowing processor operation.
ISSN:2159-3477
DOI:10.1109/ISVLSI.2018.00106