SIFT: a low-overhead dynamic information flow tracking architecture for SMT processors

Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT) is a powerful technique that can protect unmodified binaries from a broad range of vulnerabilities such as buffer overflow and code injection attacks. Software DIFT implementations incur very high performance overhead, while comprehensive hardware implementations add substantial complexity to the microarchitecture, making it unlikely for chip manufacturers to adopt them. In this paper, we propose SIFT (SMT-based DIFT), where a separate thread performing taint propagation and policy checking is executed in a spare context of an SMT processor. However, the instructions for the checking thread are generated in hardware using self-contained offthe-critical path logic at the commit stage of the pipeline. We investigate several optimizations to the base design including: (1) Prefetching of the taint data from shadow memory when the corresponding data is accessed by the primary thread; (2) Optimizing the generation of the taint instructions to rem...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CF
• Authors: Meltem Ozsoy, Dmitry Ponomarev, Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh, Tameesh Suri
• Keywords: Applied Computing, CF 2011, Dift, Shadow Memory, Substantial Complexity