CFI CaRE: Hardware-supported Call and Return Enforcement for Commercial Microcontrollers Thomas Nyman Jan-Erik Ekberg Lucas Davi N. Asokan Aalto University, Finland Trustonic, Finland University of Aalto University, Finland
[email protected] [email protected] Duisburg-Essen,
[email protected] Trustonic, Finland Germany thomas.nyman@ lucas.davi@wiwinf. trustonic.com uni-due.de ABSTRACT CFI (Section 3.1) is a well-explored technique for resisting With the increasing scale of deployment of Internet of Things (IoT), the code-reuse attacks such as Return-Oriented Programming concerns about IoT security have become more urgent. In particular, (ROP) [47] that allow attackers in control of data memory to subvert memory corruption attacks play a predominant role as they allow the control flow of a program. CFI commonly takes the formof remote compromise of IoT devices. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is inlined enforcement, where CFI checks are inserted at points in the a promising and generic defense technique against these attacks. program code where control flow changes occur. For legacy applica- However, given the nature of IoT deployments, existing protection tions CFI checks must be introduced by instrumenting the pre-built mechanisms for traditional computing environments (including CFI) binary. Such binary instrumentation necessarily modifies the mem- need to be adapted to the IoT setting. In this paper, we describe ory layout of the code, requiring memory addresses referenced by the challenges of enabling CFI on microcontroller (MCU) based the program to be adjusted accordingly [28]. This is typically done IoT devices. We then present CaRE, the first interrupt-aware CFI through load-time dynamic binary rewriting software [14, 39].