Energy-security tradeoff in a secure cache architecture against buffer overflow attacks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a cache architecture, called SCache , to detect buffer-overflow attacks at run time. Furthermore, the energy-security efficiency of SCache is discussed. SCache generates replica cache lines on each return-address store, and compares the original value loaded from the memory stack to the replica one on the corresponding return-address load. The number and the placement policy of the replica line strongly affect both energy and vulnerability. In our evaluation, it is observed that SCache can protect more than 99.3% of return-address loads from buffer-overflow attacks, while it increases total cache energy consumption by about 23%, compared to a well-known low-power cache.