Efficient Control Flow Attestation by Speculating on Control Flow Path Representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tyler, Liam, Caulfield, Adam, Nunes, Ivan De Oliveira
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tyler, Liam
Caulfield, Adam
Nunes, Ivan De Oliveira
author_facet Tyler, Liam
Caulfield, Adam
Nunes, Ivan De Oliveira
contents Control Flow Attestation (CFA) allows remote verification of run-time software integrity in embedded systems. However, CFA is limited by the storage/transmission costs of generated control flow logs (CFlog). Recent work has proposed application-specific optimizations by speculating on likely sub-paths in CFlog and replacing them with reserved symbols at runtime. Albeit effective, prior approaches do not consider the representation of addresses in a control flow path for speculation. This work proposes RESPEC-CFA, an architectural extension for CFA allowing for speculation on (1) the locality of control flows and (2) their Huffman encoding. Alone, RESPEC-CFA reduces CFlog sizes by up to 90.1%. Combined with prior methods, RESPEC-CFA yields reductions of up to 99.7%, representing a significant step toward practical CFA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_12345
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Control Flow Attestation by Speculating on Control Flow Path Representations
Tyler, Liam
Caulfield, Adam
Nunes, Ivan De Oliveira
Cryptography and Security
Control Flow Attestation (CFA) allows remote verification of run-time software integrity in embedded systems. However, CFA is limited by the storage/transmission costs of generated control flow logs (CFlog). Recent work has proposed application-specific optimizations by speculating on likely sub-paths in CFlog and replacing them with reserved symbols at runtime. Albeit effective, prior approaches do not consider the representation of addresses in a control flow path for speculation. This work proposes RESPEC-CFA, an architectural extension for CFA allowing for speculation on (1) the locality of control flows and (2) their Huffman encoding. Alone, RESPEC-CFA reduces CFlog sizes by up to 90.1%. Combined with prior methods, RESPEC-CFA yields reductions of up to 99.7%, representing a significant step toward practical CFA.
title Efficient Control Flow Attestation by Speculating on Control Flow Path Representations
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12345