Using Hardware Performance Counters to Detect Control Hijacking Attacks

Abstract

Code reuse techniques can circumvent existing security measures. For example, attacks such as Return Oriented Programming (ROP) use fragments of the existing code base to create an attack. Since this code is already in the system, the Data Execution Prevention methods cannot prevent the execution of this reorganised code. Existing software-based Control Flow Integrity can prevent this attack, but the overhead is enormous. Most of the improved methods utilise reduced granularity in exchange for a small performance overhead. Hardware-based detection also faces the same performance overhead and accuracy issues. Benefit from HPC's large-area loading on modern CPU chips, we propose a detection method based on the monitoring of hardware performance counters, which is a lightweight system-level detection for malicious code execution to solve the restrictions of other software and hardware security measures, and is not as complicated as Control Flow Integrity.