Paper Info
Title
A compiler-hardware approach to software protection for embedded systems
Abstract
Because of their rapid growth in recent years, embedded systems present a new front in vulnerability and an attractive target for attackers. Their pervasive use, including sensors and mobile devices, makes it easier for an adversary to gain physical access to facilitate both attacks and reverse engineering of the system. This paper describes a system - CODESSEAL - for software protection and evaluates its overhead. CODESSEAL aims to protect embedded systems from attackers with enough expertise and resources to capture the device and attempt to manipulate not only software, but also hardware. The protection mechanism involves both a compiler-based software tool that instruments executables and an on-chip FPGA-based hardware component that provides run-time integrity and control flow checking on the executable code. The use of reconfigurable hardware allows CODESSEAL to provide such security services as confidentiality, integrity and program-flow protection in a platform-independent manner without requiring a redesign of the processor. Similarly, the compiler instrumentation hides the security details from software developers. Software and data protection techniques are presented for our system and a performance analysis is provided using cycle accurate simulation. Our experimental results show that protecting instructions and data with a high level of security can be achieved with low performance penalty, in most cases less than 10%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1016/j.compeleceng.2008.06.010
Computers & Electrical Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
security detail,data protection technique,on-chip fpga-based hardware component,encryption,program-flow protection,compiler-hardware approach,embedded systems,software developer,fpga,security,reconfigurable hardware,software integrity,compiler-based software tool,software protection,protection mechanism,codesign,embedded system,software integration,chip,control flow,mobile device,software development,data protection,reverse engineering
Computer science,Software security assurance,Computer network,Software system,Real-time computing,Software,Computer hardware,Software development,Executable,Avionics software,Compiler,Software construction,Operating system,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
35
2
Computers and Electrical Engineering
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.55
20
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Olga Gelbart1252.51
Eugen Leontie2143.57
Bhagirath Narahari333142.59
Rahul Simha413712.42