Control Flow Checking at Virtual Edges

• LiPing Liu,
• LinLin Ci,
• Wei Liu,
• Hui Yang,

Vol. 11, No. 1, January 29, 2017
10.3837/tiis.2017.01.021, Download Paper (Free):

• Trusted Computing
• Dynamic measurement
• Control-flow errors
• Error Detection
• Virtual edges.

Abstract

Dynamically checking the integrity of software at run-time is always a hot and difficult spot for trusted computing. Control-flow integrity is a basic and important safety property of software integrity. Many classic and emerging security attacks who introduce illegal control-flow to applications can cause unpredictable behaviors of computer-based systems. In this paper, we present a software-based approach to checking violation of control flow integrity at run-time. This paper proposes a high-performance and low-overhead software control flow checking solution, control flow checking at virtual edges (CFCVE). CFCVE assigns a unique signature to each basic block and then inserts a virtual vertex into each edge at compile time. This together with insertion of signature updating instructions and checking instructions into corresponding vertexes and virtual vertexes. Control flow faults can be detected by comparing the run-time signature with the saved one at compile time. Our experimental results show that CFCVE incurs only 10.61% performance overhead on average for several C benchmark programs and the average undetected error rate is only 9.29%. Compared with previous techniques, CFCVE has the characteristics of both high fault coverage and low memory and performance overhead.

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