• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.225-234
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• 2018

Control flow errors are caused by the vulnerability of memory and result in system failure. Signature-based control flow monitoring is a representative method for alleviating the problem. The method commonly consists of two routines; one routine is signature update and the other is signature verification. However, in the existing signature-based control flow monitoring, monitoring target application is tightly combined with the monitoring code, and the operation of monitoring in a single thread is the basic model. This makes the signature-based monitoring method difficult to expect performance improvement that can be taken in multi-thread and multi-core environments. In this paper, we propose a new signature-based control flow monitoring model that separates signature update and signature verification in thread level. The signature update is combined with application thread and signature verification runs on a separate monitor thread. In the proposed model, the application thread and the monitor thread are separated from each other, so that we can expect a performance improvement that can be taken in a multi-core and multi-thread environment.