Evaluating the Effectiveness of Obfuscated Instruction Codes for Malware Resistance

Malware and maliciously crafted user input represent serious threats to modern computer systems. Many attacks begin with difficult-to-prevent vulnerabilities, such as code injection or memory corruption, usually achieved by exploiting known bugs in specific programs. We introduce a novel processor architecture which utilizes obfuscated hardware in order to effectively detect altered memory contents before they can be executed. This detection system also uses hardware reconfigura-bility to its advantage, providing the flexibility to counteract other attack vectors relying on code execution and demonstrating significant resistance to brute-force attacks. In addition, we present a prototype architectural implementation as an initial demonstration of feasibility.