Hardware support for secure processing in embedded systems

Abstract

The inherent limitations of embedded systems make them particularly vulnerable to attacks. We have developed a hardware monitor that operates in parallel to the embedded processor and detects any attack that causes the embedded processor to deviate from its originally programmed behavior. We explore several different characteristics that can be used for monitoring and quantitative tradeoffs between these approaches. Our results show that our proposed hash-based monitoring pattern can detect attacks within one instruction cycle at lower memory requirements than traditional approaches that use control-flow information.