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An efficient control flow validation method using redundant computing capacity of dual-processor architecture

Microprocessors in safety-critical system are extremely vulnerable to hacker attacks and circuit crosstalk, as they can modify binaries and lead programs to run along the wrong control flow paths. It is a significant challenge to design a run-time validation method with few hardware modification. In...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Wang, Qingran, Guo, Wei, Wei, Jizeng
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6070227/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30067794
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201127
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author Wang, Qingran
Guo, Wei
Wei, Jizeng
author_facet Wang, Qingran
Guo, Wei
Wei, Jizeng
author_sort Wang, Qingran
collection PubMed
description Microprocessors in safety-critical system are extremely vulnerable to hacker attacks and circuit crosstalk, as they can modify binaries and lead programs to run along the wrong control flow paths. It is a significant challenge to design a run-time validation method with few hardware modification. In this paper, an efficient control flow validation method named DCM (Dual-Processor Control Flow Validation Method) is proposed basing on dual-processor architecture. Since a burst of memory-access-intensive instructions could block pipeline and cause lots of waiting clocks, the DCM assigns the idle pipeline cycles of the blocked processor to the other processor to validate control flow at run time. An extra lightweight monitor unit in each processor is needed and a special dual-processor communication protocol is also designed to schedule the redundant computing capacity between two processors to do validation tasks better. To further improve the efficiency, we also design a software-based self-validation algorithm to help reduce validation times. The combination of both hardware method and software method can speed up the validation procedure and protect the control flow paths with different emphasis. The cycle-accurate simulator GEM5 is used to simulate two ARMv7-A processors with out-of-order pipeline. Experiment shows the performance overhead of DCM is less than 22% on average across the SPEC 2006 benchmarks.
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spelling pubmed-60702272018-08-09 An efficient control flow validation method using redundant computing capacity of dual-processor architecture Wang, Qingran Guo, Wei Wei, Jizeng PLoS One Research Article Microprocessors in safety-critical system are extremely vulnerable to hacker attacks and circuit crosstalk, as they can modify binaries and lead programs to run along the wrong control flow paths. It is a significant challenge to design a run-time validation method with few hardware modification. In this paper, an efficient control flow validation method named DCM (Dual-Processor Control Flow Validation Method) is proposed basing on dual-processor architecture. Since a burst of memory-access-intensive instructions could block pipeline and cause lots of waiting clocks, the DCM assigns the idle pipeline cycles of the blocked processor to the other processor to validate control flow at run time. An extra lightweight monitor unit in each processor is needed and a special dual-processor communication protocol is also designed to schedule the redundant computing capacity between two processors to do validation tasks better. To further improve the efficiency, we also design a software-based self-validation algorithm to help reduce validation times. The combination of both hardware method and software method can speed up the validation procedure and protect the control flow paths with different emphasis. The cycle-accurate simulator GEM5 is used to simulate two ARMv7-A processors with out-of-order pipeline. Experiment shows the performance overhead of DCM is less than 22% on average across the SPEC 2006 benchmarks. Public Library of Science 2018-08-01 /pmc/articles/PMC6070227/ /pubmed/30067794 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201127 Text en © 2018 Wang et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Wang, Qingran
Guo, Wei
Wei, Jizeng
An efficient control flow validation method using redundant computing capacity of dual-processor architecture
title An efficient control flow validation method using redundant computing capacity of dual-processor architecture
title_full An efficient control flow validation method using redundant computing capacity of dual-processor architecture
title_fullStr An efficient control flow validation method using redundant computing capacity of dual-processor architecture
title_full_unstemmed An efficient control flow validation method using redundant computing capacity of dual-processor architecture
title_short An efficient control flow validation method using redundant computing capacity of dual-processor architecture
title_sort efficient control flow validation method using redundant computing capacity of dual-processor architecture
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6070227/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30067794
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201127
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