Sponge-Based Control-Flow Protection for IoT Devices

Mario Werner; Thomas Unterluggauer; David Schaffenrath; Stefan Mangard

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arXiv · 1802.06691

Sponge-Based Control-Flow Protection for IoT Devices

Mario Werner·Thomas Unterluggauer·David Schaffenrath·Stefan Mangard

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Abstract

Embedded devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) face a wide variety of security challenges. For example, software attackers perform code injection and code-reuse attacks on their remote interfaces, and physical access to IoT devices allows to tamper with code in memory, steal confidential Intellectual Property (IP), or mount fault attacks to manipulate a CPU's control flow. In this work, we present Sponge-based Control Flow Protection (SCFP). SCFP is a stateful, sponge-based scheme to ensure the confidentiality of software IP and its authentic execution on IoT devices. At compile time, SCFP encrypts and authenticates software with instruction-level granularity. During execution, an SCFP hardware extension between the CPU's fetch and decode stage continuously decrypts and authenticates instructions. Sponge-based authenticated encryption in SCFP yields fine-grained control-flow integrity and thus prevents code-reuse, code-injection, and fault attacks on the code and the control flow. In addition, SCFP withstands any modification of software in memory. For evaluation, we extended a RISC-V core with SCFP and fabricated a real System on Chip (SoC). The average overhead in code size and execution time of SCFP on this design is 19.8% and 9.1%, respectively, and thus meets the requirements of embedded IoT devices.

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BibTeX RIS

Mario Werner, Thomas Unterluggauer, David Schaffenrath, Stefan Mangard. 2018-02-19. Sponge-Based Control-Flow Protection for IoT Devices. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06691

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