Hardware solution for detection and prevention of buffer overflow attacks

This paper proposed a new hardware solution for detection and prevention of stack-smashing attacks. A number is kept as key in CPU to encrypt return address. The cipher return address is inserted between stack frames. The plain return address is pushed to stack as conventional. If the both return addresses loaded back mismatch when subroutine returns, buffer overflow is then detected and exception is incurred to prevent malicious attack. All the excessive stack operations are implemented by adding specific hardware circuits in CPU. These operation and hardware modification are transparent to software. The performance overhead can be ignored due to parallel execution units in the CPU architecture.