The Control Flow Authentication Strategy Basing On Dual-core Security Processor Architecture

With the rapid development of microprocessor technology,embedded devices have been widely used in most aspects of people's work and life.Some critical security areas,such as bank security systems and aerospace,are gradually adopting embedded devices as their core security components.But embedded devices are still faced with lots of threats from both inside and outside.On the one hand,hacker attacks and circuit crosstalk can modify binaries and lead program to run along the wrong control flow path.This can cause the program to produce wrong results,and even lead to leakage of security information.On the other hand,some embedded devices exposed to harsh environments such as cosmic space or strong magnetic field may be affected by highenergy particle beams or electromagnetic crosstalk,which will lead to wrong results as well.And protecting the control flow when program is running can protect the program implement its function correctly in any situation.Therefore,it is necessary to design a run-time validation method with few hardware modifications to protect correct control flow of embedded devices.In this thesis,two special security processors are designed and each processor has one hardware monitor component.The redundant computing capacity of two processors is utilized to do validation work.To further reduce hardware overhead and speed up the validation procedure,the hardware checking method and the software self checking method are combined.And this special combination can efficiently reduce the repeated validation times.The proposed dual-processor control flow validation architecture are simulated on open source simulator GEM5 with ARMv7-A architecture.The simulation experiment which was done across the SPEC 2006 verified th e correctness of the design and evaluated the system performance.