Morpheus II is a secure processor designed to prevent control flow attacks. Morpheus II strengthens the defenses of the Morpheus [1] processor, by deploying always-on encryption to obfuscate code and pointers along with runtime churn to thwart side-channel attacks. Focusing on Remote Code Execution attacks, we modified the RISC-V Rocket core to support always-encrypted code and code pointers with negligible performance impact and less than 2% area overhead. Morpheus II was deployed running a web server interface to a mock medical database on AWS F1 instances, where it was red-teamed for three months by over 500 security researchers. No vulnerabilities were discovered in Morpheus II. In addition, we evaluated Morpheus II against a range of CWE attack classes including a Blind ROP attack on the web server. We show that Morpheus II defenses increase Blind ROP probe time for gadgets from weeks to likely thousands of years.
Authors: Austin Harris, Tarunesh Verma, Shijia Wei, Lauren Biernacki, Alex Kisil, Misiker Tadesse Aga, Valeria Bertacco, Baris Kasikci, Mohit Tiwari, Todd Austin
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/host49136.2021.9702275
Publish Year: 2021
