Dynamic Tracking of Information Flow Signatures for Security Checking

Memory-based attacks represent one of the largest attack classes in the field. Many techniques have been proposed to protect applications from certain classes of memory exploits, however, few of these techniques can protect the application from all memory attacks, and few permit the protection of only select variables. We present a technique to provide protection of select variables from a wide range of memory attacks. The protection is provided by computing the dependence tree of each critical variable, ensuring that no variable or instruction within the dependence tree is corrupted by utilizing hardware supported runtime checks. We evaluate the technique using software based emulation.