A Hardware-Assisted Security Monitoring Method for Jump Instruction and Jump Address in Embedded Systems

With the development of embedded systems towards networking and intelligence, the security threats they face are becoming more difficult to prevent. Existing protection methods make it difficult to monitor jump instructions and their target addresses for tampering by attackers at the low hardware implementation overhead and performance overhead. In this paper, a hardware-assisted security monitoring module is designed to monitor the integrity of jump instructions and jump addresses when executing programs. The proposed method has been implemented on the Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA platform. Experiments show that this method is able to effectively monitor tampering attacks on jump instructions as well as target addresses while the embedded system is executing programs.

I. Introduction

With the small power consumption, strong specialization and streamlined structure, embedded systems are increasingly used in the Internet of Things (IOT)[1], smart manufacturing, new energy vehicles and other fields[2], but the potential security threats they face are also increasingly prominent[3], such as code injection attacks (CIAs)[4], code reuse attacks (CRAs)[5], and buffer overflow attacks[6],