Towards Anomaly Detection in Embedded Systems Application Using LLVM Passes

Abstract

Software security exploits, such as Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks, have persisted for more than a decade. ROP attacks inject malicious behaviors into programs, posing serious risks to computing devices, and they can be par-ticularly challenging to detect in systems with limited resources. In this paper, we introduce an approach that exploits Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) passes, programmatic transformations applied during compilation, to detect ROP attacks in ARM-based embedded systems. By customizing LLVM passes, developers can integrate tailored security checks and optimizations into embedded systems requirements. Our approach is motivated by the use of Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs) for certain mitigations, which are not commonly available on all embedded systems. The experimental evaluation of our approach for de-tecting ROP attacks in real-world applications shows that it is feasible and can be extended to detect new attacks independently of an Operating System (OS). The storage overhead induced by our approach is approximately 55%.