Vulnerability exploitation mitigation technology based on heterogeneous redundant embedded terminals

Embedded controller chips play an important role in IoT, vehicle-to-everything, industrial internet, and other fields. However, with the proliferation of the Internet of Things, embedded terminal devices accessing the network face a great risk of vulnerability attacks. Due to the limited resources and high real-time requirement of embedded devices, traditional desktop operating system security measures are difficult to transplant and deploy. This paper proposes a mitigation strategy to maximize vulnerability of embedded systems based on ARM architecture. Based on the theory of moving target defense and the idea of heterogeneous redundant actuator, an equivalent variant is constructed to mitigate the attack of buffer overflow vulnerability. The hardware resources include IROM, IRAM, and the main controller STM32F103VET6 of the Cortex-M3 kernel, thus building heterogeneous redundant actuator and reducing the probability of embedded system intrusion. After implementing the heterogeneous redundant actuator of the embedded system, theoretical verification is also carried out in combination with the ARM-Shellcode experiment. The experimental results show that the proposed method can alleviate the attack using the buffer overflow vulnerability type.