CRAlert: Hardware-Assisted Code Reuse Attack Detection
Wenhao Wang, Guangyu Hu, Xiaolin Xu, Jiliang Zhang · IEEE Transactions on Circuits & Systems II Express Briefs · 2021
Code reuse attack (CRA) hijacking the control flow of programs for malicious actions without injecting any codes, has brought great concerns to system security. Most existing defenses incur high performance overhead or require the instruction set architecture (ISA) extension and compiler modification. In this brief, we presentCRAlert, a new hardware-assisted CRA detection scheme, targets at mitigating the root causes of such code reuse attacks.CRAlertis compatible with the current SW/HW environment without requiring any architectural modifications to the processor core. As the proof-of-concept, we prototype the proposed framework on a Xilinx ML605 FPGA. The experimental results demonstrate thatCRAlertcould detect CRAs with an extremely low performance overhead (geometric mean) of 0.363%.