Variable Record Table: A Unified Hardware-Assisted Framework for Runtime Security

Abstract: Modern computing systems face security threats, including memory corruption attacks, speculative execution vul- nerabilities, and control-flow hijacking. Although existing solu- tions address these threats individually, they frequently introduce performance overhead and leave security gaps. This paper presents a Variable Record Table (VRT) with a unified hardware- assisted framework that simultaneously enforces spatial memory safety against buffer overflows, back-edge control-flow integrity (CFI), and speculative execution attack detection. The VRT dynamically constructs a protection table by instrumenting run- time instructions to extract memory addresses, bounds metadata, and control-flow signatures. Our evaluation across MiBench and SPEC benchmarks shows that VRT successfully detects all attack variants tested with zero additional instruction overhead. Fur- thermore, it maintains memory requirements below 25KB (for 512 entries) and maintains area / power overhead under 8% and 11.65 μW, respectively. By consolidating three essential security mechanisms into a single hardware structure, VRT provides comprehensive protection while minimizing performance impact.