RAP-Track: Efficient Control Flow Attestation via Parallel Tracking in Commodity MCUs

Control Flow Attestation (CFA) has emerged as an important security service to enable remote verification of control flow paths in safety-critical embedded systems. However, current CFA for commodity devices suffers performance penalties due to code instrumentation and frequent context switches required to securely log control flow paths at runtime. Our work introduces RAP-Track, a technique leveraging commodity hardware extensions, namely Micro Trace Buffer and Data Watchpoint and Trace Unit, to track control flow paths in parallel with the execution of the attested program, thus avoiding aforementioned overheads present in state-of-the-art CFA. Our evaluation (based on an open-source prototype of RAP-Track) demonstrates substantial performance gains, enhancing practicality and security of CFA.