The B-side of side channel leakage: Control flow security in embedded systems

Abstract

The security of an embedded system is often compromised when a “trusted” program is subverted to behave differently. Such as executing maliciously crafted code and/or skipping legitimate parts of a “trusted” program. Several countermeasures have been proposed in the literature to counteract these behavioural changes of a program. A common underlying theme in most of them is to define security policies at the lower level of the system in an independent manner and then check for security violations either statically or dynamically at runtime. In this paper we propose a novel method that verifies a program’s behaviour, such as the control flow, by using the device’s side channel leakage.