A Brief Review on Some Architectures Providing Support for DIFT

TL;DR

This survey reviews hardware architectures supporting Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT), focusing on integrated architectures, their protection schemes, evolution, and the trade-offs between security, versatility, and generality.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of integrated DIFT architectures, highlighting their evolution, design trade-offs, and security features.

Findings

Integrated architectures have evolved to improve security and versatility.

Trade-offs exist between security, generality, and complexity in DIFT architectures.

Comparison clarifies strengths and weaknesses of different DIFT approaches.

Abstract

Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT) is a technique to track potential security vulnerabilities in software and hardware systems at run time. The last fifteen years have seen a lot of research work on DIFT, including both hardware-based and software-based implementations for different types of processor architectures. This survey briefly reviews some hardware architectures that provide DIFT support. Starting from introducing different approaches for hardware based DIFT, this survey focuses on integrated/in-core architectures. Protection schemes, including tagging system, tag propagation, and tag checking for each architecture will be discussed. The survey is organized in such a way that it illustrates the evolution of integrated DIFT architectures, each architecture tries to improve the precious proposed architectures generality/versatility weaknesses. However, improving security while providing generality and versatility is kind of trade-offs. This survey compares the architectures from different aspects to show the trade-offs clearer.