Nonlinear Codes for Control Flow Checking

A hardware-based control flow monitoring technique enables to detect both errors in the control flow and the instruction stream being executed on a processor. However, as was shown in recent papers, these techniques fail to detect malicious carefully-tuned manipulation of the instruction stream in a basic block. This paper presents a non-linear encoder and checker that can cope with this weakness.

I. Introduction

Dependability is an important characteristic of modern computing system. The hardware components of a system can be affected by faults due to different root causes such as environmental perturbations (e.g., radiations, electromagnetic interference) or malicious attacks (fault attacks, software modification or replacement).