Comparative Analysis and Enhancement of CFG-based Hardware-Assisted CFI Schemes

Subverting the flow of instructions (e.g., by use code-reuse attacks) still poses a serious threat to security today’s systems. Various control integrity (CFI) schemes have been proposed as powerful technique detect and mitigate such attacks. In recent years, many hardware-assisted implementations CFI enforcement based on graphs (CFGs) presented academia. Such approaches check whether transfers follow intended CFG limiting valid target addresses. However, these papers all different platforms were evaluated with sets benchmark applications, which makes quantitative comparisons hardly possible. For this paper, we implemented multiple promising CFG-based common platform comprising RISC-V within FPGA. By porting almost 40 applications system can present meaningful comparison various techniques in terms run-time performance, hardware utilization, binary size. addition, an enhanced approach that is inspired what consider best concepts ideas previously mechanisms. We made more practical feature-complete tackling some problems largely ignored previously. show fine-grained scheme be achieved even less overheads than demonstrated.