Control Flow Protection by Cryptographic Instruction Chaining

Shahzad Ahmad, Stefan Rass, Stefan Rass, Maksim Goman, Manfred Schlägl, Daniel Große

2025

Abstract

We present a novel secure execution environment that provides comprehensive protection for program execution through a unified cryptographic approach. Our construction employs authenticated encryption, ensuring instruction confidentiality, integrity, and correct execution ordering. The system’s key innovation lies in its cryptographic binding of consecutive instructions through a novel key chaining mechanism that prevents instruction reordering and replay attacks while maintaining an enforced order of instructions using cryptographic chaining via keys. We introduce specialized handling for control flow operations, including branches, jumps, and function calls, that preserves security guarantees across complex execution paths. The framework includes a protection mechanism for registers and memory, creating a fully secured execution environment. Our performance analysis quantifies the computational overhead and provides a Python proof-of-concept implementation that validates the practical viability of our approach https: //github.com/shahzadssg/Control-Flow-Protection-by-Cryptographic-Instruction-Chaining.git.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ahmad S., Rass S., Goman M., Schlägl M. and Große D. (2025). Control Flow Protection by Cryptographic Instruction Chaining. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT; ISBN 978-989-758-760-3, SciTePress, pages 233-246. DOI: 10.5220/0013577700003979

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt25,
author={Shahzad Ahmad and Stefan Rass and Maksim Goman and Manfred Schlägl and Daniel Große},
title={Control Flow Protection by Cryptographic Instruction Chaining},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT},
year={2025},
pages={233-246},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013577700003979},
isbn={978-989-758-760-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT
TI - Control Flow Protection by Cryptographic Instruction Chaining
SN - 978-989-758-760-3
AU - Ahmad S.
AU - Rass S.
AU - Goman M.
AU - Schlägl M.
AU - Große D.
PY - 2025
SP - 233
EP - 246
DO - 10.5220/0013577700003979
PB - SciTePress