Buffer Overflow Attack and Prevention for an FPGA-Based Soft-Processor System

Abstract

Embedded systems have a plethora of role in all spheres of life ranging from medical application to nuclear application to industrial applications. For rapid prototyping of designs, reconfigurable hardware like FPGA is the most preferred solution. Such designs often rely on an embedded processor in the FPGA—sometimes implemented as a soft configuration in FPGA fabric or hard-wired as the integrated circuit while still connected to the FPGA fabric. Typically, embedded systems are exposed to various types of attacks, of those major vulnerability is the buffer overflow attack on the processor used. The buffer overflow attack corrupts the return address of a function or process and subsequently changes the execution order. Our goal is to study the effect of buffer overflow attack in an embedded processor, demonstrate the attack on a full chain of embedded system and providing cost-effective mitigation solution to prevent this type of attack.