A software based approach to achieving optimal performance forsignature control flow checking

摘要

The authors present a software-based approach that uses run-timeprogram behavior to minimize the performance overhead in signaturecontrol flow checking. In general, for both RISC(reduced-instruction-set-computer) and CISC(complex-instruction-set-computer) architectures, it is found that usingrun-time information can reduce the performance overhead by 50%. For theMC68000, the performance overhead for adding justifying and referencesignatures to the program code is approximately 2.8%. In addition tooptimizing the performance, the authors' approach does not increase thehardware complexity of the monitor. Furthermore, anO(N2) algorithm which inserts justifyingsignatures on the arcs of the program control flow graph with Nnodes is presented. It is shown that the algorithm complexity ofprevious schemes which insert justifying signatures in the program nodesis exponential