Towards Dynamic Execution Environment for System Security Protection against Hardware Flaws

Attacks exploiting security flaws in software are very common. They are typically addressed during the ongoing software development process or by providing software patches. Attacks making use of hardware related flaws via malicious software recently gained popularity. Prominent examples are errata based, aging-related or, for example, the infamous Rowhammer-attack. In this paper, we present an approach to detect software based attacks which exploit hardware flaws. Since the flaws are typically triggered by characteristic instruction sequences, our approach is implemented as a dynamic execution environment for program monitoring at runtime. Several case studies underline the effectiveness and the low overhead of our approach.