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 present a novel fault injection attack detector with high flexibility and low overhead. Our solution is based on the reuse of a security primitive used in many IoT devices, i.e., ring oscillator (RO) physically unclonable function (PUF). Our results show that we obtain a high detection effectiveness and no false alarms against most popular fault injection attacks based on voltage and clock manipulations. ... Read more

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 Internet of Things (IoT) segment. However, SNNs work very different than conventional neural network architectures. Consequently, applying SNNs in the field might introduce new unexpected security vulnerabilities. This paper explores and identifies potential sources of information leakage for the Izhikevich neuron, which is a popular neuron model used in digital implementations of SNNs. Simulations and experiments on FPGA implementation of the spiking neurons show that timing and power can be used to infer important information of the internal functionality of the network. Additionally, the paper demonstrates that is feasible to perform a reverse engineering attack using both power and timing leakage. ... Read more