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Real-Time Instruction Execution Monitoring with Hardware-Assisted Security Monitoring Unit in RISC-V Embedded Systems

  • Zhun Zhang
  • , Qiang Hao
  • , Dongdong Xu
  • , Jiqing Wang
  • , Jinhui Ma
  • , Jinlei Zhang
  • , Jiakang Liu
  • , Xiang Wang*
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Beihang University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Embedded systems involve an integration of a large number of intellectual property (IP) blocks to shorten chip's time to market, in which, many IPs are acquired from the untrusted third-party suppliers. However, existing IP trust verification techniques cannot provide an adequate security assurance that no hardware Trojan was implanted inside the untrusted IPs. Hardware Trojans in untrusted IPs may cause processor program execution failures by tampering instruction code and return address. Therefore, this paper presents a secure RISC-V embedded system by integrating a Security Monitoring Unit (SMU), in which, instruction integrity monitoring by the fine-grained program basic blocks and function return address monitoring by the shadow stack are implemented, respectively. The hardware-assisted SMU is tested and validated that while CPU executes a CoreMark program, the SMU does not incur significant performance overhead on providing instruction security monitoring. And the proposed RISC-V embedded system satisfies good balance between performance overhead and resource consumption.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 8th Annual International Conference on Network and Information Systems for Computers, ICNISC 2022
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages192-196
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781665453516
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event8th Annual International Conference on Network and Information Systems for Computers, ICNISC 2022 - Virtual, Online, China
Duration: 16 Sep 202219 Sep 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2022 8th Annual International Conference on Network and Information Systems for Computers, ICNISC 2022

Conference

Conference8th Annual International Conference on Network and Information Systems for Computers, ICNISC 2022
Country/TerritoryChina
CityVirtual, Online
Period16/09/2219/09/22

Keywords

  • Embedded system
  • RISC-V
  • Security Monitoring Unit (SMU)
  • hardware Trojan attack
  • hardware security

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