Reconfigurable Dynamic Trusted Platform Module for Control Flow Checking

Abstract

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) has gained its popularity in computing systems as a hardware security approach. TPM provides the boot time security by verifying the platform integrity including hardware and software. However, once the software is loaded, TPM can no longer protect the software execution. In this work, we propose a dynamic TPM design, which performs control flow checking to protect the program from runtime attacks. The control flow checker is integrated at the commit stage of the processor pipeline. The control flow of program is verified to defend the attacks such as stack smashing using buffer overflow and code reuse. We implement the proposed dynamic TPM design in FPGA to achieve high performance, low cost and flexibility for easy functionality upgrade based on FPGA. In our design, neither the source code nor the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) needs to be changed. The benchmark simulations demonstrate less than 1% of performance penalty on the processor, and an effective software protection from the attacks.

Hardware-assisted online defense against malware and exploits

“…CFIMon [75], Davi et al [77], BR [76], Das et al [113] technique [110,111] Several works leverage hardware features to defend against ROP attacks. Kayaalp et al [134] gave a signature-based method on the execution patterns.…”