Memory monitor module for embedded systems

Abstract

Embedded systems are vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks. In this paper, we propose a hardware memory monitor module that aims to detect buffer overflow attacks by analyzing the security of an embedded processor at the instruction level. The functionality of the memory monitor module does not rely on the source code and can perform security check through dynamic methods. Compared with several existing countermeasures that protect only part of the program’s data space, our proposed memory monitor module can protect the program’s entire data space. The proposed memory monitor module has negligible performance overhead because it runs in parallel with the embedded processor. As demonstrated in an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based prototype, the experimental results show that our memory monitor module can effectively resist several types of buffer overflow attacks with approximately a 15% hardware cost overhead and only a 0.1% performance penalty.