A Hardware-based Technique for Efficient Implicit Information Flow Tracking

To access sensitive information, some recent advanced attacks have been successful in exploiting implicit flows in a program in which sensitive data affects the control path and in turn affects other data. To track the sensitive data through implicit flows, several software- and hardware-based approaches have been proposed, but they suffer from the non-negligible performance overhead. In this paper, we propose a hardware tracking engine for implicit flow, called the implicit flow tracking unit (IFTU). By adopting the tracking scheme for implicit flow and mapping it to the specialized hardware, our solution can efficiently perform the implicit flow tracking with reasonable area costs.