Defending against Thermal Covert Channel Attacks by Task Migration in Many-core System

Wu, Qian; Wang, Xiaohang; Chen, Junying

doi:10.1109/iccs52645.2021.9697251

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In [7], DVFS is applied to the cores that have a TCC transceiver to shut down any data transmission right from the source. Another countermeasure approach in [14] tries to separate the identified transmitter and receiver farther apart from each other through task migration. Since thermal signals decay very fast with respect to distance, the BER of TCC becomes unacceptably high when the distance between the cores running the transmitter and the receiver is beyond a few hops.…”

Section: B Tcc Detection Methods and Coutermeasuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combating Stealthy Thermal Covert Channel Attack With Its Thermal Signal Transmitted in Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum

Wang

Jiang

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many-core systems are susceptible to attacks launched by thermal covert channel (TCC) attacks. Detection of TCC attacks often relies on the use of threshold-based approaches or variants, and a countermeasure to thwart the channel can be applied only after an attack is deemed to be present. In this paper, we describe a direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) based TCC, where its thermal data are modulated by a pseudorandom bit sequence. Unfortunately, such DSSS-based TCC has an extremely low signal strength that the signal is nearly indistinguishable from the noise and thus cannot be detected by any existing threshold-based detection methods. To combat this stealthy TCC, we propose a novel detection scheme that lets the received signal pass through a differential filter where irrelevant frequency components occupied mainly by the noise gets eliminated and the filtered signal is next compared against a threshold for successful detection. Experimental results show that the DSSS-based TCC can effectively survive detection by the existing detection methods with its BER as low as 4%. In contrast, with the proposed detection and countermeasure applied, the detection accuracy jumps to 89%, and the BER of the DSSS-based TCC soars to 50%, which indicates that the TCC is practically shut down.

show abstract

Section: B Tcc Detection Methods and Coutermeasuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combating Stealthy Thermal Covert Channel Attack With Its Thermal Signal Transmitted in Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum

Wang

Jiang

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An application running on the receiving core has access to the temperature sensor and reads the encoded temperature profile and decodes the signal to retrieve the secret data [ 37 ]. This type of attack can be accomplished fully remotely since the attacker does not need direct physical access to probe or measure the IC [ 50 ].…”

Section: Types Of Physical Covert Channelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The app then decodes the temperature profile to retrieve confidential data. The attacker does not need physical access to the system, since the entire attack can be completed remotely [ 37 , 50 ].…”

Section: Covert Channel Attacks In 25d/3d Icsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Covert Channel Communication as an Emerging Security Threat in 2.5D/3D Integrated Systems

Miketic

Dhananjay

Salman

2023

Sensors

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, first, a broad overview of existing covert channel communication-based security attacks is provided. Such covert channels establish a communication link between two entities that are not authorized to share data. The secret data is encoded into different forms of signals, such as delay, temperature, or hard drive location. These signals and information are then decoded by the receiver to retrieve the secret data, thereby mitigating some of the existing security measures. The important steps of covert channel attacks are described, such as data encoding, communication protocol, data decoding, and models to estimate communication bandwidth and bit error rate. Countermeasures against covert channels and existing covert channel detection techniques are also summarized. In the second part of the paper, the implications of such attacks for emerging packaging technologies, such as 2.5D/3D integration are discussed. Several covert channel threat models for 2.5D/3D ICs are also proposed.

show abstract

Information-Theoretic Perspective to Thermal Covert Channels

Miketic

Yethiraj

Salman

2023

2023 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Defending against Thermal Covert Channel Attacks by Task Migration in Many-core System

Cited by 6 publications

References 29 publications

Combating Stealthy Thermal Covert Channel Attack With Its Thermal Signal Transmitted in Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum

Combating Stealthy Thermal Covert Channel Attack With Its Thermal Signal Transmitted in Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum

Covert Channel Communication as an Emerging Security Threat in 2.5D/3D Integrated Systems

Information-Theoretic Perspective to Thermal Covert Channels

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About