Evaluation of the Runtime Intrusion Prevention of ARM-Based Systems in Wireless Networks

Nowadays, most wireless communication modules are built based on ARM-based chips. Buffer overflow attack (BOA) is one of the mainstream runtime intrusion on the ARM architecture. However, so far there are few reports on evaluation of the intrusion prevention capability of ARM-based operating systems from BOAs. To provide with such evaluation, in this paper, first, the Runtime Intrusion Prevention Evaluator was implemented on ARM-based operating systems, which we called RIPE-ARM, where 850 kinds of effective BOAs are integrated. Next, using the QEMU virtual machine, we set up an ARM-based system, Raspberry Pi, for the evaluation. Then, the RIPE-ARM was used to test and evaluate the intrusion prevention capability of Raspberry Pi. The kinds of BOAs that each defense or defense combination can successfully prevent were identified, respectively. We found that among all these defense methods, there is one combinational method turns out to be optimal that is able to make 840 of the total 850 kinds of attacks fail. Also, the results show that there are ten BOA kinds that no defense can mitigate. Those kinds are presented in details.