Orthrus: efficient software integrity protection on multi-cores

  • Authors:

  • Ruirui Huang;Daniel Y. Deng;G. Edward Suh

  • Affiliations:

  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fifteenth edition of ASPLOS on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient hardware/software system that significantly enhances software security through diversified replication on multi-cores. Recent studies show that a large class of software attacks can be detected by running multiple versions of a program simultaneously and checking the consistency of their behaviors. However, execution of multiple replicas incurs significant overheads on today's computing platforms, especially with fine-grained comparisons necessary for high security. Orthrus exploits similarities in automatically generated replicas to enable simultaneous execution of those replicas with minimal overheads; the architecture reduces memory and bandwidth overheads by compressing multiple memory spaces together, and additional power consumption and silicon area by eliminating redundant computations. Utilizing the hardware architecture, Orthrus implements a fine-grained memory layout diversification with the LLVM compiler and can detect corruptions in both pointers and critical data. Experiments indicate that the Orthrus architecture incurs minimal overheads and provides a protection against a broad range of attacks.