Secure program execution via dynamic information flow tracking

TLDR

Dynamic information flow tracking protects programs against malicious software attacks by detecting and restricting spurious flows from untrusted I/O, since attacks require transferring control to malevolent code. The authors propose a simple architectural mechanism—dynamic information flow tracking—to significantly improve computing system security with negligible performance overhead. Their approach has the operating system flagging certain input channels as spurious and the processor tracking all information flows originating from those channels. The scheme effectively blocks a wide range of attacks, is transparent to users and applications, and incurs only a 1.4 % memory overhead and a 1.1 % performance overhead.

Abstract

We present a simple architectural mechanism called dynamic information flow tracking that can significantly improve the security of computing systems with negligible performance overhead. Dynamic information flow tracking protects programs against malicious software attacks by identifying spurious information flows from untrusted I/O and restricting the usage of the spurious information.Every security attack to take control of a program needs to transfer the program's control to malevolent code. In our approach, the operating system identifies a set of input channels as spurious, and the processor tracks all information flows from those inputs. A broad range of attacks are effectively defeated by checking the use of the spurious values as instructions and pointers.Our protection is transparent to users or application programmers; the executables can be used without any modification. Also, our scheme only incurs, on average, a memory overhead of 1.4% and a performance overhead of 1.1%.