CVA6-CFI: A First Glance at RISC-V Control-Flow Integrity Extensions
By Simone Manoni 1, Emanuele Parisi 2, Riccardo Tedeschi 1, Davide Rossi 1,3, Andrea Acquaviva 1, Andrea Bartolini 1
1 Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering - University of Bologna, Italy
2 High Performance Domain-Specific Architectures Group - Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
3 Department of Digital Design and Open Hardware - Chips-IT, Italy
Abstract
This work presents the first design, integration, and evaluation of the standard RISC-V extensions for Control-Flow Integrity (CFI). The Zicfiss and Zicfilp extensions aim at protecting the execution of a vulnerable program from control-flow hijacking attacks through the implementation of security mechanisms based on shadow stack and landing pad primitives. We introduce two independent and configurable hardware units implementing forward-edge and backward-edge control-flow protection, fully integrated into the open-source CVA6 core. Our design incurs in only 1.0% area overhead when synthesized in 22 nm FDX technology, and up to 15.6% performance overhead based on evaluation with the MiBench automotive benchmark subset. We release the complete implementation as open source.
Index Terms — Control-Flow Integrity, Shadow Stack, Landing Pad, RISC-V
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