A design of security module to protect program execution in embedded system

This paper presents a security mechanism using hardware monitoring to protect the program's execution on embedded system. Mainly, three types of information are monitored: code's basic block checksum, execution time of code's basic block and the beginning-ending addresses of code's basic block. This information is extracted from the target program through additional tools. And they are integrated into the monitoring model. When the program is running normally, the security module will first calculate real-time status information of the current execution, and then compare this information with the data stored in monitoring model. Once the abnormal situation is detected, it will be processed (at now, just record). Preliminary experimental results show that the designed basic block information extraction tools and the security module can be expected to work properly. Additional performance loss and Additional requirements of on-chip storage, brought by the security module, are in the acceptable range.