SHIELD: a software hardware design methodology for security and reliability of MPSoCs

Security of MPSoCs is an emerging area of concern in embedded systems. Security is jeopardized by code injection attacks, which are the most common types of software attacks. Previous attempts to detect code injection in MPSoCs have been burdened with significant performance overheads. In this work, we present a hardware/software methodology "SHIELD" to detect code injection attacks in MPSoCs. SHIELD instruments the software programs running on application processors in the MPSoC and also extracts control flow and basic block execution time information for runtime checking. We employ a dedicated security processor (monitor processor) to supervise the application processors on the MPSoC. Custom hardware is designed and used in the monitor and application processors. The monitor processor uses the custom hardware to rapidly analyze information communicated to it from the application processors at runtime. We have implemented SHIELD on a commercial extensible processor (Xtensa ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Krutartha Patel, Sri Parameswaran
• Keywords: Application Processors, Code Injection, Code Injection Attacks, Computer Architecture, DAC 2008