Software-Only Control-Flow Integrity Against Fault Injection Attacks

In this paper, we introduce a new Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) scheme for detecting Fault Injection Attacks (FIA). Our scheme is designed to be as generic as possible and to cover any microcontroller on the market, including non-secure ones. It is a full software approach, designed to detect CFI disruptions caused by FIA. The proposal is portable and designed for a high-level language implementation (C in our case). The main characteristic of our scheme is to link a predictable computed Chain of Trust (CoT) with the assets of a program. This approach classically allows the detection of fault injections leading to an illegitimate path of execution. In addition, this solution is designed to detect when a legitimate execution path is wrongly followed due to FIA. Simulations on several benchmarks finally validate the effectiveness of the method, using a multiple instruction skip faults model.