Thwarting Code-Reuse and Side-Channel Attacks in Embedded Systems

Nowadays, embedded devices are increasingly present in everyday life, often controlling and processing critical information. For this reason, these devices make use of cryptographic protocols. However, embedded devices are particularly vulnerable to attackers seeking to hijack their operation and extract sensitive information. Code-Reuse Attacks (CRAs) can steer the execution of a program to malicious outcomes, leveraging existing on-board code without direct access to the device memory. Moreover, Side-Channel Attacks (SCAs) may reveal secret information to the attacker based on mere observation of the device. In this paper, we are particularly concerned with thwarting CRAs and SCAs against embedded devices, while taking into account their resource limitations. Fine-grained code diversification can hinder CRAs by introducing uncertainty to the binary code; while software mechanisms can thwart timing or power SCAs. The resilience to either attack may come at the price of the overall efficiency. Moreover, a unified approach that preserves these mitigations against both CRAs and SCAs is not available. This is the main novelty of our approach, Secure Diversity by Construction (SecDivCon); a combinatorial compiler-based approach that combines software diversification against CRAs with software mitigations against SCAs. SecDivCon restricts the performance overhead in the generated code, offering a secure-by-design control on the performance-security trade-off. Our experiments show that SCA-aware diversification is effective against CRAs, while preserving SCA mitigation properties at a low, controllable overhead. Given the combinatorial nature of our approach, SecDivCon is suitable for small, performance-critical functions that are sensitive to SCAs. SecDivCon may be used as a building block to whole-program code diversification or in a re-randomization scheme of cryptographic code.