Performance Evaluation and Consideration of Shadow Stack on RISC-V Architecture 


Vol. 13,  No. 9, pp. 413-420, Sep.  2024
https://doi.org/10.3745/TKIPS.2024.13.9.413


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  Abstract

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture, used in various hardware implementations, and can be flexibly expanded to meet system requirements through the RV64I base instruction set and 16 standard extensions. Currently, the RISC-V architecture employs the shadow stack technique to protect return addresses. This paper compares the performance of the compact shadow stack mechanism and the parallel shadow stack mechanism in the RISC-V architecture using the SPEC CPU 2017 and beebs benchmarks. Experimental results show that the parallel shadow stack mechanism exhibits higher overhead than the compact shadow stack mechanism. This suggests that the efficiency of the parallel mechanism is reduced due to the limitations of the RISC-V architecture, making the compact shadow stack more suitable for RISC-V. Additionally, this paper identifies the security limitations of the existing RISC-V shadow stack and proposes directions for enhancing the performance and security of shadow stack mechanisms to ensure a secure execution environment for RISC-V.

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  Cite this article

[IEEE Style]

K. H. Young, H. G. Won, P. S. Hwan, K. D. Hyun, "Performance Evaluation and Consideration of Shadow Stack on RISC-V Architecture," The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society, vol. 13, no. 9, pp. 413-420, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3745/TKIPS.2024.13.9.413.

[ACM Style]

Kang Ha Young, Han Go Won, Park Sung Hwan, and Kwon Dong Hyun. 2024. Performance Evaluation and Consideration of Shadow Stack on RISC-V Architecture. The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society, 13, 9, (2024), 413-420. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3745/TKIPS.2024.13.9.413.