Hardware-assisted integrity monitor based on lightweight hash function

Abstract

Security of embedded system is widely noticed for its common usage and open application environment. A hardware-assisted monitoring architecture based on lightweight hash function is proposed to detect run-time program integrity on the embedded processor. The fine-grained property information is extracted as the integrity verification object, and hashed by lightweight hash function as the monitoring model. The hardware architecture is implemented on an SoPC platform. Take five standard benchmarks for experimental objects, the experiments show that the proposed monitor accounts for less than 8.37% area overheads of the processor, and the average CPI of our secure processor with pipelined lightweight hash functions increases no more than 6.36%.