An Architectural-Enhanced Secure Embedded System with a Novel Hybrid Search Scheme

Embedded systems are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks when they are in execution. Advanced attacks, such as buffer overflow, are able to inject malicious code at runtime. Besides, physical attacks are also becoming more common. This paper presents a new hardware-assisted architecture to validate the execution of the program which is reliable, effective and of low overhead. A specified tool is developed to collect software properties of each basic block from binary code automatically. At runtime, the proposed scheme checks whether the executing code conforms to the permissible behavior and triggers appropriate response mechanisms when illegal actions are detected. This architecture won't change the program and has no restriction on the developer. The performance overhead of the architecture is mostly less than 1% according to the selected benchmarks and the hybrid search scheme can reduce the indexing overhead to approximately 30% of that of binary search.