D-Box: DMA-enabled Compartmentalization for Embedded Applications

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: D-Box: DMA-enabled Compartmentalization for Embedded Applications
المؤلفون: Mera, Alejandro, Chen, Yi Hui, Sun, Ruimin, Kirda, Engin, Lu, Long
سنة النشر: 2022
المجموعة: Computer Science
مصطلحات موضوعية: Computer Science - Cryptography and Security
الوصف: Embedded and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have seen an increase in adoption in many domains. The security of these devices is of great importance as they are often used to control critical infrastructure, medical devices, and vehicles. Existing solutions to isolate microcontroller (MCU) resources in order to increase their security face significant challenges such as specific hardware unavailability, Memory Protection Unit (MPU) limitations and a significant lack of Direct Memory Access (DMA) support. Nevertheless, DMA is fundamental for the power and performance requirements of embedded applications. In this paper, we present D-Box, a systematic approach to enable secure DMA operations for compartmentalization solutions of embedded applications using real-time operating systems (RTOS). D-Box defines a reference architecture and a workflow to protect DMA operations holistically. It provides practical methods to harden the kernel and define capability-based security policies for easy definition of DMA operations with strong security properties. We implemented a D-Box prototype for the Cortex-M3/M4 on top of the popular FreeRTOS-MPU (F-MPU). The D-Box procedures and a stricter security model enabled DMA operations, yet it exposed 41 times less ROP (return-orienting-programming) gadgets when compared with the standard F-MPU. D-Box adds only a 2% processor overhead while reducing the power consumption of peripheral operation benchmarks by 18.2%. The security properties and performance of D-Box were tested and confirmed on a real-world case study of a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) application.
Comment: Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium 2022
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
DOI: 10.14722/ndss.2022.24053
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/2201.05199
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.2201.05199
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv
الوصف
DOI:10.14722/ndss.2022.24053