ReCFA: Resilient Control-Flow Attestation

TL;DR

ReCFA introduces a scalable, resilient control-flow attestation method for complex commodity software in IoT devices, using binary analysis and a multi-phase event condensing approach to ensure runtime integrity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multi-phase control-flow condensing technique that does not require offline path measurement, enabling scalable attestation for complex software.

Findings

Efficient control-flow event condensing demonstrated on real-world benchmarks.

Effective detection of control-flow hijacking attempts.

Scalable approach suitable for commodity IoT software.

Abstract

Recent IoT applications gradually adapt more complicated end systems with commodity software. Ensuring the runtime integrity of these software is a challenging task for the remote controller or cloud services. Popular enforcement is the runtime remote attestation which requires the end system (prover) to generate evidence for its runtime behavior and a remote trusted verifier to attest the evidence. Control-flow attestation is a kind of runtime attestation that provides diagnoses towards the remote control-flow hijacking at the prover. Most of these attestation approaches focus on small or embedded software. The recent advance to attesting complicated software depends on the source code and CFG traversing to measure the checkpoint-separated subpaths, which may be unavailable for commodity software and cause possible context missing between consecutive subpaths in the measurements. In this work, we propose a resilient control-flow attestation (ReCFA), which does not need the offline measurement of all legitimate control-flow paths, thus scalable to be used on complicated commodity software. Our main contribution is a multi-phase approach to condensing the runtime control-flow events; as a result, the vast amount of control-flow events are abstracted into a deliverable size. The condensing approach consists of filtering skippable call sites, folding program-structure related control-flow events, and a greedy compression. Our approach is implemented with binary-level static analysis and instrumentation. We employ a shadow stack mechanism at the verifier to enforce context-sensitive control-flow integrity and diagnose the compromised control-flow events violating the security policy. The experimental results on real-world benchmarks show both the efficiency of the control-flow condensing and the effectiveness of security enforcement.