LiteHAX: Lightweight Hardware-Assisted Attestation of Program Execution

• Published in: 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) pp. 1 - 8
• Main Authors: Dessouky, Ghada, Abera, Tigist, Ibrahim, Ahmad, Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: ACM 01-11-2018
• Subjects: Internet of Things; Malware; Program processors; Programming; Runtime; Security
• ISSN: 1558-2434
• DOI: 10.1145/3240765.3240821

Unlike traditional processors, embedded Internet of Things (IoT) devices lack resources to incorporate protection against modern sophisticated attacks resulting in critical consequences. Remote attestation (RA) is a security service to establish trust in the integrity of a remote device. While conventional RA is static and limited to detecting malicious modification to software binaries at load-time, recent research has made progress towards runtime attestation, such as attesting the control flow of an executing program. However, existing control-flow attestation schemes are inefficient and vulnerable to sophisticated data-oriented programming (DOP) attacks subvert these schemes and keep the control flow of the code intact. In this paper, we present LiteHAX, an efficient hardware-assisted remote attestation scheme for RISC-based embedded devices that enables detecting both control-flow attacks as well as DOP attacks. LiteHAX continuously tracks both the control-flow and data-flow events of a program executing on a remote device and reports them to a trusted verifying party. We implemented and evaluated LiteHAX on a RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC) and show that it has minimal performance and area overhead.