Self-healing control flow protection in sensor applications

Since sensors do not have a sophisticated hardware archi-tecture or an operating system to manage code for safety, attacks injecting code to exploit memory-related vulnerabil-ities can present threats to sensor applications. In a sen-sor’s simple memory architecture, injected code can alter the control flow of a sensor application to either misuse ex-isting routines or download other malicious code to achieve attacks. To protect the control flow, this paper proposes a self-healing scheme that can detect attacks attempting to alter the control flow and then recover sensor applications to normal operations with minimum overhead. The self-healing scheme embeds diversified protection code at partic-ular locations to enforce access control in program memory. Both the access control code and the recovery code are de-signed to be resilient to control flow attacks that attempt to evade the protection. Furthermore, the self-healing scheme directly processes application code at the machine instruc-tion level, instead of performing control or data analysis on source code. The implementation and evaluation show that the self-healing scheme is lightweight in protecting sensor applications