Enhancing Security Through Hardware-assisted Runtime Validation

The growing number of information security breaches in electronic and com-puting systems calls for new design paradigms that consider security as a primary design objective. This is particularly relevant in the embedded do-main, where the security solution should be customized to the needs of the target system, while considering other design objectives such as cost, perfor-mance, and power. Due to the increasing complexity and shrinking design cycles of embedded software, most embedded systems present a host of soft-ware vulnerabilities that can be exploited by security attacks. Many attacks are initiated by causing a violation in the properties of data (e.g., integrity, privacy, access control rules, etc.) associated with a “trusted ” program that is executing on the system, leading to a range of undesirable effects. In this work, we develop a general framework that provides security assur-ance against a wide class of security attacks. Our work is based on the ob-servation that a program’s permissible behavior with respect to data accesse