Hardware assisted control flow obfuscation for embedded processors

+ With more applications being deployed on embedded platforms, software protection becomes increasingly important. This problem is crucial on embedded systems like financial transaction terminals, pay-TV access-control decoders, where adversaries may easily gain full physical accesses to the systems and critical algorithms must be protected from being cracked. However, as this paper points out that protecting software with either encryption or obfuscation cannot completely preclude the control flow information from being leaked. Encryption has been widely studied and employed as a traditional approach for software protection, however, the control flow information is not 100% hidden with solely encrypting the code. On the other hand, pure software-based obfuscation has been proved inefficient to protect software due to its lack of theoretical foundation and considerable performance overhead introduced by complicated transformations. Moreover, even though obfuscation can prevent static r...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CASES
• Authors: Xiaotong Zhuang, Tao Zhang, Hsien-Hsin S. Lee, Santosh Pande
• Keywords: CASES 2004, Control Flow Information, Embedded Systems, Obfuscation