Journals Proceedings

Abstract

In recent years, computer systems belonging to large companies, governments as well as personal computers have been experiencing an increasing wave of attacks that disrupt their normal operation or leak sensitive data. In this context, this paper presents a hardware-based approach (here namely a watchdog connected to the processor bus) which aims at detecting and recovering the system from stack smashing buffer overflow attack. Compared to existing approaches, the proposed technique does not need application code recompilation or use of any kind of supervisor software (e.g., an Operating System - OS) to manage memory usage. To validate the approach, a case-study based on the LEON3 softcore processor and benchmark test codes have been implemented. Experimental results indicate that this approach is able to detect and recover from an intrusion tentative for 100% of the test cases, while yielding low area overhead, negligible attack detection latency and processor performance degradation.