Approximate Computing and Its Application to Hardware Security

Liu, Weiqiang; Gu, Chongyan; Qu, Gang; O’Neill, Máire

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98935-8_3

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Furthermore, new approximate computing applications will be exploited. For instance, approximate computing can also provide new approaches for hardware security and implementation of cryptocurrency mining and lattice-based postquantum cryptography [22]. It is believed that more applications will utilize approximate computing due to power limitations.…”

Section: Reliability and Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Retrospective and Prospective View of Approximate Computing [Point of View}

2020

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C omputing systems are conventionally designed to operate as accurately as possible. However, this trend faces severe technology challenges, such as power consumption, circuit reliability, and high performance. For nearly half a century, performance and power consumption of computing systems have been consistently improved by relying mostly on technology scaling. As per Dennard's scaling, the size of a transistor has been considerably shrunk and the supply voltage has been reduced over the years, such that circuits operate at higher frequencies but nearly at the same power dissipation level. However, as Dennard's scaling tends toward an end, it is difficult to further improve performance under the same

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Section: Reliability and Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Retrospective and Prospective View of Approximate Computing [Point of View}

2020

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“…Most of the current research investigations focus on using approximate computing (e.g., approximate circuits) to improve performance with an acceptable loss of accuracy. Although approximate computing designs save power and area, security vulnerabilities have been reported [2], [7], [8], [9] due to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the intrinsic errors during an approximate computational execution. [2] has provided a comprehensive classification of the works on this topic, including the challenges and opportunities in approximate computing.…”

Section: Security Vulnerabilities In Approximate Circuitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security and Approximation: Vulnerabilities in Approximation-Aware Testing

Dou

Wang

et al. 2023

IEEE Trans. Emerg. Topics Comput.

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Approximation-aware testing has been recently proposed because conventional methods cannot take into account the flexibility encountered in approximate circuits for handling errors. However, the security vulnerabilities of approximation-aware testing techniques have not been fully considered. Approximate circuits utilize several schemes with a variety of error patterns, that open new opportunities for attackers. In this paper, the security threats in approximation-aware testing methods are investigated. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the topic on the security analysis of approximation-aware testing techniques has not been treated in the technical literature. Two malicious tampering attacks are proposed in addition to an attack that can invalidate hardware Trojan detection. The proposed two tampering attacks, namely tampering of the exact netlist (TEN) and tampering of the error metric (TEM), are evaluated with experiments. The results show that original non-acceptable faults can be mistakenly assigned as acceptable faults and that approximation-aware testing techniques can invalidate the detection of hardware Trojans in approximate circuits due to fault classification.

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“…In the exclusive logic-based attack detection module [79], the outputs of the approximate function are selectively examined to generate an alert signal to indicate hardware attacks on AC IPs. The works [37,74] considers the approximate technique that truncate certain LSBs in a data for power saving and proposes to embed security bits in the truncated data to detect errors. Reference [78] protects AC systems by blurring the boundary between AC and non-AC zones such that the obfuscated boundary can mislead attackers and thus improve the success rate of attack detection.…”

Section: Examples Of Runtime Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security Threat Analyses and Attack Models for Approximate Computing Systems

Yellu

Buell

Mark

et al. 2021

ACM Trans. Des. Autom. Electron. Syst.

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Approximate computing (AC) represents a paradigm shift from conventional precise processing to inexact computation but still satisfying the system requirement on accuracy. The rapid progress on the development of diverse AC techniques allows us to apply approximate computing to many computation-intensive applications. However, the utilization of AC techniques could bring in new unique security threats to computing systems. This work does a survey on existing circuit-, architecture-, and compiler-level approximate mechanisms/algorithms, with special emphasis on potential security vulnerabilities. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are performed to assess the impact of the new security threats on AC systems. Moreover, this work proposes four unique visionary attack models, which systematically cover the attacks that build covert channels, compensate approximation errors, terminate normal error resilience mechanisms, and propagate additional errors. To thwart those attacks, this work further offers the guideline of countermeasure designs. Several case studies are provided to illustrate the implementation of the suggested countermeasures.

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Approximate Computing and Its Application to Hardware Security

Cited by 14 publications

References 46 publications

A Retrospective and Prospective View of Approximate Computing [Point of View}

A Retrospective and Prospective View of Approximate Computing [Point of View}

Security and Approximation: Vulnerabilities in Approximation-Aware Testing

Security Threat Analyses and Attack Models for Approximate Computing Systems

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