Hardware Assisted Protection for Data Validation at Run-Time on Embedded Processors

Abstract

The security of embedded systems has attracted much attention as they are being used in more and more fields in people’s life. Traditional technologies to protect the normal program execution are often software-based and they mainly focus on the protection of application code. In this paper, a hardware assisted framework is proposed to protect the program data validation at run-time. It divides the data into static data and dynamic data according to whether its values and spaces are constant or not. We extract the static data previously and get its validation information before the program runs. Since the information of static data stay constant during the execution, any deviation from it in the real-time data validation can be detected dynamically. Attacks to the integrity of dynamic data are defended by checking the data validation according to the store and load instructions at run-time. CRC algorithm is used in this proposal to compromise the security checking and resource consumption. The experimental result shows our proposed technique can protect program data validation with an acceptable resource overhead.