Cross-Layer Vulnerability Analysis of System-on-Chip against Physical Hardware Attacks

Kiaei, Pantea

Etd

Cross-Layer Vulnerability Analysis of System-on-Chip against Physical Hardware Attacks

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Hardware attacks, such as power side-channel attacks, jeopardize the security of embedded systems at a low cost. Protecting embedded systems against such attacks entails protecting hardware blocks, software programs, and the integration of hardware and software. As the development of hardware and software is typically independent, novel cross-layer protection mechanisms are desirable. The development of hardware and software itself has its own complexities. A hardware designer or a software developer implements the hardware or software in a high-level language, which is later optimized to the final product using automated tools. These automated tools are chiefly concerned about optimizing a design for better performance and can omit an inserted countermeasure at higher design abstraction layers. Furthermore, it is essential to evaluate the vulnerability of a system before its deployment. Design-time leakage assessment techniques can find whether a design is vulnerable to side-channel attacks. At the time of writing this dissertation, design-time leakage assessment methodologies are not developed to automatically find the cause of an observed leakage in hardware and software. This dissertation contains three main contributions. First, we present cross-layer countermeasures to protect embedded systems against power side-channel analysis and fault injection. Through hardware-software co-designed protection mechanisms we are able to ensure the implemented protections persist at the final product. Second, we introduce a methodology to enable faster design-time leakage assessment. We further test the validity of our design-time assessment compared to physical measurements by designing and fabricating a custom chip. Last, we establish a technique to automatically pinpoint the cause of a certain observed power side-channel leakage in hardware and software.

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