Abstract
Authenticated execution (AE) is a security mechanism that cryptographically validates an application's code as it executes, as well as verifies its control flow. AE provides fully local guarantees which can deliver protection for control flow, instruction flow, and software intellectual property which makes it ideal for devices with little to no connectivity. However, we find that previous AE approaches make concessions in their implementation that severely hinder their security guarantees. In this article, we examine the weaknesses in previous AE approaches and why they occur. We also introduce SAECAS as a mechanism to reliably perform AE in an embedded device. We formally prove the security aspects of SAECAS, demonstrating its security capabilities. Moreover, we implement SAECAS on a RISC-V core and test it on a Terasic DE2-115 FPGA board to demonstrate its capabilities, showing that a reliable system can be made with a hardware overhead of ≈ 2× when including extra SoC components and no performance impact.
Published Version
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