Integration of ROP/JOP Monitoring IPs in an ARM-based SoC

Abstract

Code reuse attack (CRA) is a powerful technique that allows attackers to perform arbitrary computation by reusing the existing code fragments. To defend from CRAs while complying with the conventional ARM-based SoC design principles, the previous hardware solution suggests the use of the ARM debug interface to acquire the control flow information of an application running on the host. However, it requires tremendous storage space to store the complementary data necessary to trace the execution flow. In this paper, we propose a new hardware CRA monitor which gives both low storage overhead and high performance. For this, we have used an instrumentation technique which transforms the original ARM binary code into a form which will ease the CRA monitor to efficiently extract through the debug interface all crucial pieces of runtime information from the trace outcomes. In addition, while the previous solution was only built to detect one type of CRAs, called return-oriented programming (ROP), ours has been designed to unify the detection logics for ROP and another important type of CRAs, called jump-oriented programming (JOP). Empirical results show that our solution dramatically reduces the storage overhead for CRA detection, yet successfully detecting both ROP and JOP attacks simultaneously with negligibly low runtime overhead and moderate area overhead.