"Morpheus II: A RISC-V Security Extension for Protecting Vulnerable Software and Hardware."

Morpheus II is a secure processor designed to prevent control flow attacks. Morpheus II strengthens the defenses of the Morpheus processor, by deploying always-on encryption to obfuscate code and pointers along with runtime churn to thwart side-channel attacks. Focusing on Remote Code Execution attacks, we modified the RISCV Rocket core to support always-encrypted code and code pointers with negligible performance impact and less than 2% area overhead. Morpheus II was deployed running a web server interface to a mock medical database on AWS F1 instances, where it was red-teamed for three months by over 500 security researchers. No vulnerabilities were discovered in Morpheus II. In addition, we evaluated Morpheus II against a range of CWE attack classes including a Blind ROP attack on the web server. We show that Morpheus II defenses increase Blind ROP probe time for gadgets from weeks to likely thousands of years.