Compiler-Directed Region-Based Security for Low-Overhead Software Protection

Software security has become a prominent area of research in recent years, with research efforts spanning a wide range of topics. Among these are techniques such as those in this paper that are in the general area of languages, compilers and architecture aimed at increasing the security of computing systems. This paper describes a compiler technique that performs risk-analysis on source code and generates an encrypted executable that both provides security but yet reduces overhead by selectively encrypting low-risk portions with less overhead. Regions of the code that are more vulnerable receive a higher degree of encryption. Experimental results for this technique, which we call Region-Based Security, using a collection of benchmarks show that execution overhead is reduced considerably by using this approach.