A survey of Hardware-based Control Flow Integrity (CFI)

TL;DR

This survey analyzes 21 recent hardware-based Control Flow Integrity architectures, evaluating their security, practicality, and limitations to guide future improvements in hardware security measures.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of existing hardware-based CFI architectures, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses for practical deployment.

Findings

Many architectures rely on difficult-to-obtain control flow models

Several architectures offer limited security guarantees

Practical issues hinder widespread adoption of some designs

Abstract

CFI is a computer security technique that detects runtime attacks by monitoring a program's branching behavior. This work presents a detailed analysis of the security policies enforced by 21 recent hardware-based CFI architectures. The goal is to evaluate the security, limitations, hardware cost, performance, and practicality of using these policies. We show that many architectures are not suitable for widespread adoption, since they have practical issues, such as relying on accurate control flow model (which is difficult to obtain) or they implement policies which provide only limited security.