Armor: Protecting Software Against Hardware Tracing Techniques

Abstract

Many modern processors have embedded hardware tracing techniques (e.g., Intel Processor Trace or ARM CoreSight). While these techniques are widely used due to their transparency and low overhead, they also bring serious security threats. Attackers can utilize hardware tracing to trace the trusted applications from a non-secure application. Existing protection techniques fail to effectively protect the runtime information when hardware tracing is employed.