Stack Redundancy to Thwart Return Oriented Programming in Embedded Systems

With the emergence of Internet of Things, embedded devices are increasingly the target of software attacks. The aim of these attacks is to maliciously modify the behavior of the software being executed by the device. The work presented in this letter has been developed for the Cyber Security Awarene...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE embedded systems letters 2018-09, Vol.10 (3), p.87-90
Main Authors: Bresch, Cyril, Hely, David, Papadimitriou, Athanasios, Michelet-Gignoux, Adrien, Amato, Laurent, Meyer, Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Buffer overflows
Computer Science
Control flow integrity
Cryptography and Security
Cybersecurity
Electronic devices
Embedded systems
Engineering Sciences
Hardware
hardware design
Low level
Micro and nanotechnologies
Microelectronics
Microprocessors
Redundancy
return oriented programming
secure processor
Security
Software
Software reliability
trusted computing
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Summary:With the emergence of Internet of Things, embedded devices are increasingly the target of software attacks. The aim of these attacks is to maliciously modify the behavior of the software being executed by the device. The work presented in this letter has been developed for the Cyber Security Awareness Week Embedded Security Challenge. This contest focuses on memory corruption issues, such as stack overflow vulnerabilities. These low level vulnerabilities are the result of code errors. Once exploited, they allow an attacker to write arbitrary data in memory without limitations. We detail in this letter a hardware-based countermeasure against return address corruption in the processor stack. First, several exploitation techniques targeting stack return addresses are discussed, whereas a lightweight hardware countermeasure is proposed and validated on the OpenRISC core. The countermeasure presented follows the shadow stack concept with a minimal hardware modification of the targeted core and an easy integration at the application level.
ISSN:1943-0663
1943-0671
DOI:10.1109/LES.2018.2819983