A Survey of Hardware-Based Control Flow Integrity (CFI)
A survey of Hardware-based Control Flow Integrity (CFI) RUAN DE CLERCQ∗ and INGRID VERBAUWHEDE, KU Leuven Control Flow Integrity (CFI) is a computer security technique that detects runtime attacks by monitoring a program’s branching behavior. This work presents a detailed analysis of the security policies enforced by 21 recent hardware-based CFI architectures. The goal is to evaluate the security, limitations, hardware cost, performance, and practicality of using these policies. We show that many architectures are not suitable for widespread adoption, since they have practical issues, such as relying on accurate control flow model (which is difficult to obtain) or they implement policies which provide only limited security. CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy → Hardware-based security protocols; Information flow control; • General and reference → Surveys and overviews; Additional Key Words and Phrases: control-flow integrity, control-flow hijacking, return oriented programming, shadow stack ACM Reference format: Ruan de Clercq and Ingrid Verbauwhede. YYYY. A survey of Hardware-based Control Flow Integrity (CFI). ACM Comput. Surv. V, N, Article A (January YYYY), 27 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn 1 INTRODUCTION Today, a lot of software is written in memory unsafe languages, such as C and C++, which introduces memory corruption bugs. This makes software vulnerable to attack, since attackers exploit these bugs to make the software misbehave. Modern Operating Systems (OSs) and microprocessors are equipped with security mechanisms to protect against some classes of attacks. However, these mechanisms cannot defend against all attack classes. In particular, Code Reuse Attacks (CRAs), which re-uses pre-existing software for malicious purposes, is an important threat that is difficult to protect against.
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