Implementing dynamic information flow tracking on microprocessors with integrated FPGA fabric (abstract only)

Today, incorporating a new hardware feature into a modern microprocessor is a highly time consuming and expensive process due to long design cycles and high costs of design and verification. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a hybrid processor architecture where an on-chip reconfigurable fabric (FPGA) is tightly coupled with a processing core. A new hardware feature for fine-grained run-time monitoring can be implemented on the FPGA fabric without requiring a re-design or a fabrication of a chip. To evaluate this FPGA co-processing approach, we implemented Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT), which is arguably one of the most powerful security features against software attacks, on the FPGA fabric. The synthesis and performance emulation results demonstrate that DIFT on the FPGA fabric adds relatively small area and power consumption to a modern microprocessor while providing the performance that is close to the performance of a custom hardware DIFT implementation.