  Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT) is a technique to track potential
security vulnerabilities in software and hardware systems at run time. The last
fifteen years have seen a lot of research work on DIFT, including both
hardware-based and software-based implementations for different types of
processor architectures. This survey briefly reviews some hardware
architectures that provide DIFT support. Starting from introducing different
approaches for hardware based DIFT, this survey focuses on integrated/in-core
architectures. Protection schemes, including tagging system, tag propagation,
and tag checking for each architecture will be discussed. The survey is
organized in such a way that it illustrates the evolution of integrated DIFT
architectures, each architecture tries to improve the precious proposed
architectures generality/versatility weaknesses. However, improving security
while providing generality and versatility is kind of trade-offs. This survey
compares the architectures from different aspects to show the trade-offs
clearer.
