Orthrus: efficient software integrity protection on multi-cores

This paper proposes an efficient hardware/software system that significantly enhances software security through diversified replication on multi-cores. Recent studies show that a large class of software attacks can be detected by running multiple versions of a program simultaneously and checking the consistency of their behaviors. However, execution of multiple replicas incurs significant overheads on today's computing platforms, especially with fine-grained comparisons necessary for high security. Orthrus exploits similarities in automatically generated replicas to enable simultaneous execution of those replicas with minimal overheads; the architecture reduces memory and bandwidth overheads by compressing multiple memory spaces together, and additional power consumption and silicon area by eliminating redundant computations. Utilizing the hardware architecture, Orthrus implements a fine-grained memory layout diversification with the LLVM compiler and can detect corruptions in both pointers and critical data. Experiments indicate that the Orthrus architecture incurs minimal overheads and provides a protection against a broad range of attacks.