Monitoring information flows in heterogeneous SoCs with a dedicated coprocessor

Security is a major issue nowadays for the embedded systems community. Untrustworthy authorities may use a wide range of attacks in order to retrieve critical information. This paper introduces ARMHEx, a practical solution targeting DIFT (Dynamic Information Flow Tracking) on ARM-based SoCs (e.g. Xilinx Zynq). ARMHEx takes profit of ARM CoreSight debug components and static analysis to drastically reduce instrumentation time overhead (up to 90% compared to existing works).

Conference paper

In GDR SoC²