FPGA based flexible information flow architecture for system protection against multiple concurrent threats using context switched semaphore

Abstract

Software security based on dynamic information flow tracking schemes has been reported in recent research. These approaches are implemented using Programmable security policies that enable software to direct hardware analysis towards a wide range of high level and low level attacks. However, the hardware implementation of the above security policies that can protect the system against concurrent attacks remains unexplored. In this research, it is planned to work on the above less explored areas using Dynamic architectures such as FPGA and ASIC and provide low-overhead security handlers that can also take into account the operating system traps. This types of attacks on a system that are likely to be taken care in this work includes both high level attacks (such as directory traversal, command injection and cross-site scripting) and low level attacks(such as buffer overflows). Focus is also to be made on low-overhead exception handling issues and provide memory corruption protection. This work focuses on detecting attacks on deployed software using hardware architecture by the methodology of dynamic information flow tracking. The work once completed can protect a system against multiple attacks at the same time and provide multiple concurrently active security policies.