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  4. Protecting Bare-Metal Embedded Systems with Privilege Overlays
 
conference paper

Protecting Bare-Metal Embedded Systems with Privilege Overlays

Clements, Abraham A.
•
Almakhdhub, Naif Saleh
•
Saab, Khaled S.
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June 23, 2017
Proceedings - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

Embedded systems are ubiquitous in every aspect ofmodern life. As the Internet of Thing expands, our dependenceon these systems increases. Many of these interconnected systemsare and will be low cost bare-metal systems, executing without anoperating system. Bare-metal systems rarely employ any securityprotection mechanisms and their development assumptions (un-restricted access to all memory and instructions), and constraints(runtime, energy, and memory) makes applying protectionschallenging. To address these challenges we present EPOXY, an LLVM-based embedded compiler. We apply a novel technique, calledprivilege overlaying, wherein operations requiring privilegedexecution are identified and only these operations execute inprivileged mode. This provides the foundation on which code-integrity, adapted control-flow hijacking defenses, and protections for sensitive IO are applied. We also design fine-grainedrandomization schemes, that work within the constraints of bare-metal systems to provide further protection against control-flowand data corruption attacks. These defenses prevent code injection attacks and ROP attacksfrom scaling across large sets of devices. We evaluate theperformance of our combined defense mechanisms for a suite of75 benchmarks and 3 real-world IoT applications. Our results forthe application case studies show that EPOXY has, on average, a 1.8% increase in execution time and a 0.5% increase in energy usage.

  • Details
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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/SP.2017.37
Scopus ID

2-s2.0-85024501556

Author(s)
Clements, Abraham A.

Purdue University

Almakhdhub, Naif Saleh

Purdue University

Saab, Khaled S.

Georgia Institute of Technology

Srivastava, Prashast

Purdue University

Koo, Jinkyu

Purdue University

Bagchi, Saurabh

Purdue University

Payer, Mathias  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2017-06-23

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

Published in
Proceedings - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
ISBN of the book

9781509055326

Article Number

7958583

Start page

289

End page

303

Subjects

Bare-metal

•

Cyber-Security

•

Diversity

•

Embedded Systems

•

Privilege Overlay

•

Security

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

OTHER

EPFL units
HEXHIVE  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

San Jose, United States

2017-05-22 - 2017-05-24

Available on Infoscience
April 4, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/248634
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