A Survey on Machine Learning in Hardware Security

Hardware security is currently a very influential domain, where each year countless works are published concerning attacks against hardware and countermeasures. A significant number of them use machine learning, which is proven to be very effective in other domains. This survey, as one of the early attempts, presents the usage of machine...

Survey on Architectural Attacks: A Unified Classification and Attack Model

According to the World Economic Forum, cyberattacks are considered as one of the most important sources of risk to companies and institutions worldwide. Attacks can target the network, software, and/or hardware. Over the years, much knowledge has been developed to understand and mitigate cyberattacks. However, new threats have appeared in...

Instruction Flow-based Detectors against Fault Injection Attacks

Fault injection attacks are a threat to all digital systems, especially to the ones conducting security sensitive operations. Recently, the strategy of observing the instruction flow to detect attacks has gained popularity. In this paper, we provide a comparative study between three hardware-based techniques (i.e., recurrent neural network (RNN)...

Exploiting PUF Variation to Detect Fault Injection Attacks

The massive deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices makes them vulnerable against physical tampering attacks, such as fault injection. These kind of hardware attacks are very popular as they typically do not require complex equipment or high expertise. Hence, it is important that IoT devices are protected against them. In this work, we...

Applying Thermal Side-Channel Attacks on Asymmetric Cryptography

Side-channel attacks (SCAs) are powerful attacks that could be used to retrieve keys from electronic devices. Several physical leakage sources can be exploited in SCAs, such as power, time, heat, and so on. Heat is one of the side-channels that is not frequently analyzed by attackers in the literature due to the high noise associated with...

LightRoAD: Lightweight Rowhammer Attack Detector

Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM)-based systems are widely used in mobile and portable applications where low-cost and high-storage memory capability are required. However, such systems are prone to attacks. A latent threat to DRAM-based system security is the so-called Rowhammer attacks. By repeatedly accessing memory, an attacker is able to...

Deterministic and Statistical Strategies to Protect ANNs against Fault Injection Attacks

Artificial neural networks are currently used for many tasks, including safety critical ones such as automated driving. Hence, it is very important to protect them against faults and fault attacks. In this work, we propose two fault injection attack detection mechanisms: one based on using output labels for a reference input, and the other on...

Protecting IoT Devices through a Hardware-driven Memory Verification

Internet of things (IoT) devices are appearing in all aspects of our digital life. As such, they have become prime targets for attackers and hackers. An adequate protection against attacks is only possible when the confidentiality and integrity of the data and applications of these devices are secured. State-of-the-art solutions mostly address...

Revealing the Secrets of Spiking Neural Networks: The Case of Izhikevich Neuron

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a strong candidate to be used in future machine learning applications. SNNs can obtain the same accuracy of complex deep learning networks, while only using a fraction of its power. As a result, an increase in popularity of SNNs is expected in the near future for cyber physical systems, especially in the...

RNN-based Detection of Fault Attacks on RSA

Physical fault injection attacks are becoming an important threat to computer systems, as fault injection equipment becomes more and more accessible. In this work, we propose a new strategy to detect fault attacks in cryptosystems. We use a recurrent neural network (RNN) to detect problems in the program flow caused by injected faults. Our...

A Security Verification Template to Assess Cache Architecture Vulnerabilities

In the recent years, cache based side-channel attacks have become a serious threat for computers. To face this issue, researches have been looking at verifying the security policies. However, these approaches are limited to manual security verification and they typically work for a small subset of the attacks. Hence, an effective verification...

LiD-CAT: A Lightweight Detector for Cache ATtacks

Cache attacks are one of the most wide-spread and dangerous threats to embedded computing systems' security. A promising approach to detect such attacks at runtime is to monitor the System-on-Chip (SoC) behavior. However, designing a secure SoC capable of detecting such attacks is very challenging: the monitors should be lightweight in order...

Guard-NoC: A protection against side-channel attacks for MPSoCs

Multi-Processor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs) are popular computational platforms for a wide variety of applications due to their energy efficiency and flexibility. Like many other platforms they are vulnerable to Side Channel Attacks (SCAs). In particular, Logical SCAs (LSCAs) are very powerful as sensitive information can be retrieved by simply...