ARMHEx: a hardware extension for information flow tracking on ARM-based platforms

Security in embedded systems is a major concern for several years. Untrustworthy authorities use a wide range of both hardware and software attacks. This paper introduces ARMHEx, a practical solution targeting DIFT (Dynamic Information Flow Tracking) implementations on ARM-based SoCs. Existing DIFT solutions are either hardly portable to SoCs or bring unsuitable time overheads. ARMHEx overcomes both issues using modern debugging CPU features, along with a coprocessor implemented in FPGA logic. This work demonstrates how ARMHEx performs DIFT with negligible communication costs.

Conference paper

In GDR SoC²