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arXiv · 2602.04991

CVA6-CFI: A First Glance at RISC-V Control-Flow Integrity Extensions

Simone Manoni·Emanuele Parisi·Riccardo Tedeschi·Davide Rossi·Andrea Acquaviva·Andrea Bartolini
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Abstract

This work presents the first design, integration, and evaluation of the standard RISC-V extensions for Control-Flow Integrity (CFI). The Zicfiss and Zicfilp extensions aim at protecting the execution of a vulnerable program from control-flow hijacking attacks through the implementation of security mechanisms based on shadow stack and landing pad primitives. We introduce two independent and configurable hardware units implementing forward-edge and backward-edge control-flow protection, fully integrated into the open-source CVA6 core. Our design incurs in only 1.0% area overhead when synthesized in 22 nm FDX technology, and up to 15.6% performance overhead based on evaluation with the MiBench automotive benchmark subset. We release the complete implementation as open source.

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Simone Manoni, Emanuele Parisi, Riccardo Tedeschi, Davide Rossi, Andrea Acquaviva, Andrea Bartolini. 2026-02-04. CVA6-CFI: A First Glance at RISC-V Control-Flow Integrity Extensions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04991

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