Malware Detection and Prevention by Monitoring and Modifying a Hardware Pipeline

The various aspects provide a method for recognizing and preventing malicious behavior on a mobile computing device before it occurs by monitoring and modifying instructions pending in the mobile computing device's hardware pipeline (i.e., queued instructions). In the various aspects, a mobile computing device may preemptively determine whether executing a set of queued instructions will result in a malicious configuration given the mobile computing device's current configuration. When the mobile computing device determines that executing the queued instructions will result in a malicious configuration, the mobile computing device may stop execution of the queued instructions or take other actions to preempt the malicious behavior before the queued instructions are executed.