Control Flow Attestation (CFA) allows remote verification of run-time software integrity in embedded systems. However, CFA is limited by the storage/transmission costs of generated control flow logs (CFlog). Recent work has proposed application-specific optimizations by speculating on likely sub-paths in CFlog and replacing them with reserved symbols at runtime. Albeit effective, prior approaches do not consider the representation of addresses in a control flow path for speculation. This work proposes RESPEC-CFA, an architectural extension for CFA allowing for speculation on (1) the locality of control flows and (2) their Huffman encoding. Alone, RESPEC-CFA reduces CFlog sizes by up to 90.1%. Combined with prior methods, RESPEC-CFA yields reductions of up to 99.7%, representing a significant step toward practical CFA.
@article{arxiv.2507.12345,
title = {Efficient Control Flow Attestation by Speculating on Control Flow Path Representations},
author = {Liam Tyler and Adam Caulfield and Ivan De Oliveira Nunes},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.12345},
year = {2025}
}