2020/05/29 by Zhuojia Shen, Shen, Zhuojia, Komail Dharsee +3 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Computer Science · #cs.CR
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.00076
8 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables
arxiv created 2020/09/04 · arxiv updated 2020/09/07
Remote code disclosure attacks threaten embedded systems as they allow attackers to steal intellectual property or to find reusable code for use in control-flow hijacking attacks. Execute-only memory (XOM) prevents remote code disclosures, but existing XOM solutions either require a memory management unit that is not available on ARM embedded systems or incur significant overhead. We present PicoXOM: a fast and novel XOM system for ARMv7-M and ARMv8-M devices which leverages ARM's Data Watchpoint and Tracing unit along with the processor's simplified memory protection hardware. On average, PicoXOM incurs 0.33% performance overhead and 5.89% code size overhead on two benchmark suites and five real-world applications.