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  4. ACES: Automatic compartments for embedded systems
 
conference paper

ACES: Automatic compartments for embedded systems

Clements, Abraham A.
•
Almakhdhub, Naif Saleh
•
Bagchi, Saurabh
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Maggi, Federico
•
Egele, Manuel
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2018
Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium
27 USENIX Security Symposium

Securing the rapidly expanding Internet of Things (IoT) is critical. Many of these "things" are vulnerable bare-metal embedded systems where the application executes directly on hardware without an operating system. Unfortunately, the integrity of current systems may be compromised by a single vulnerability, as recently shown by Google's P0 team against Broadcom's WiFi SoC. We present ACES (Automatic Compartments for Embedded Systems)1, an LLVM-based compiler that automatically infers and enforces inter-component isolation on bare-metal systems, thus applying the principle of least privileges. ACES takes a developer-specified compartmentalization policy and then automatically creates an instrumented binary that isolates compartments at runtime, while handling the hardware limitations of baremetal embedded devices. We demonstrate ACES' ability to implement arbitrary compartmentalization policies by implementing three policies and comparing the compartment isolation, runtime overhead, and memory overhead. Our results show that ACES' compartments can have low runtime overheads (13% on our largest test application), while using 59% less Flash, and 84% less RAM than the Mbed μVisor-the current state-of-the-art compartmentalization technique for bare-metal systems. ACES' compartments protect the integrity of privileged data, provide control-flow integrity between compartments, and reduce exposure to ROP attacks by 94.3% compared to μVisor.

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Type
conference paper
Scopus ID

2-s2.0-85068863481

Author(s)
Clements, Abraham A.

Purdue University

Almakhdhub, Naif Saleh

Purdue University

Bagchi, Saurabh

Purdue University

Payer, Mathias  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Editors
Maggi, Federico
•
Egele, Manuel
•
Payer, Mathias
•
Carminati, Michele
Date Issued

2018

Publisher

USENIX Association

Published in
Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium
ISBN of the book

9781939133045

Book part number

7

Series title/Series vol.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); 14828 LNCS

ISSN (of the series)

1611-3349

0302-9743

Start page

65

End page

82

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
HEXHIVE  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
27 USENIX Security Symposium

Baltimore, United States

2018-08-15 - 2018-08-17

FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

Brenden Dolan-Gavitt

Honeywell International Inc.

NSF CNS-1513783

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Available on Infoscience
April 4, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/248586
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