SecureD: A Secure Dual Core Embedded Processor

TL;DR

SecureD introduces a hardware/software countermeasure for dual-core embedded processors that effectively defends against code-injection and power analysis attacks with minimal overhead.

Contribution

It is the first to propose a combined hardware/software solution for both attack types in a dual-core embedded system.

Findings

Area overhead of 3.80%

Runtime increase of 20.0%

Effective against code-injection and power analysis attacks

Abstract

Security of embedded computing systems is becoming of paramount concern as these devices become more ubiquitous, contain personal information and are increasingly used for financial transactions. Security attacks targeting embedded systems illegally gain access to the information in these devices or destroy information. The two most common types of attacks embedded systems encounter are code-injection and power analysis attacks. In the past, a number of countermeasures, both hardware- and software-based, were proposed individually against these two types of attacks. However, no single system exists to counter both of these two prominent attacks in a processor based embedded system. Therefore, this paper, for the first time, proposes a hardware/software based countermeasure against both code-injection attacks and power analysis based side-channel attacks in a dual core embedded system. The proposed processor, named SecureD, has an area overhead of just 3.80% and an average runtime increase of 20.0% when compared to a standard dual processing system. The overhead were measured using a set of industry standard application benchmarks, with two encryption and five other programs.