Path Sensitive Signatures for Control Flow Error Detection

Transistors' performance has been improving by shrinking feature sizes, lowering voltage levels, and reducing noise margins. However, these changes also make transistors more vulnerable and susceptible to transient faults. As a result, transient fault protection has become a crucial aspect of designing reliable systems. According to previous research, it is about 2.5x harder to mask control flow errors than data flow errors, making control flow protection critical. In this paper, we present Path Sensitive Signatures (PaSS), a low overhead and high fault coverage software method to detect illegal control flows. PaSS targets off-the-shelf embedded systems and combines two different methods to detect control flow errors that incorrectly jump to both nearby and faraway locations. In addition, it provides a lightweight technique to protect inter-procedural control flow transfers including calls and returns. PaSS is evaluated on the SPEC2006 benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that with the same level of fault coverage, PaSS only incurs 15.5% average performance overhead compared to 64.7% overhead incurred by the traditional signature-based technique. PaSS can also further extend fault coverage by providing inter-procedural protection at an additional 3.6% performance penalty.