Embedded software is developed under the assumption that hardware execution is always correct. Fault attacks break and exploit that assumption. Through the careful introduction of targeted faults, an adversary modifies the control-flow or data-flow integrity of software. The modified program execution is then analyzed and used as a source of information leakage, or as a mechanism for privilege escalation. Due to the increasing complexity of modern embedded systems, and due to the difficulty of guaranteeing correct hardware execution even under a weak adversary, fault attacks are a growing threat. For example, the assumption that an adversary has to be close to the physical execution of software, in order to inject an exploitable fault into hardware, has repeatedly been shown to be incorrect. This article is a review on hardware-based fault attacks on software, with emphasis on the context of embedded systems. We present a detailed discussion of the anatomy of a fault attack, and we make a review of fault attack evaluation techniques. The paper emphasizes the perspective from the attacker, rather than the perspective of countermeasure development. However, we emphasize that improvements to countermeasures often build on insight into the attacks.
The outsourcing of the design and manufacturing of integrated circuits has raised severe concerns about the piracy of Intellectual Properties and illegal overproduction. Logic locking has emerged as an obfuscation technique to protect outsourced chip designs, where the circuit netlist is locked and can only be functional once a secure key is programmed. However, Boolean Satisfiability-based attacks have shown to break logic locking, simultaneously motivating researchers to develop more secure countermeasures. In this paper, we present a novel fault injection attack to break any locking techniq…
Fault attacks are active, physical attacks that an adversary can leverage to alter the control-flow of embedded devices to gain access to sensitive information or bypass protection mechanisms. Due to the severity of these attacks, manufacturers deploy hardware-based fault defenses into security-critical systems, such as secure elements. The development of these countermeasures is a challenging task due to the complex interplay of circuit components and because contemporary design automation tools tend to optimize inserted structures away, thereby defeating their purpose. Hence, it is critical …
Code voting was introduced by Chaum as a solution for using a possibly infected-by-malware device to cast a vote in an electronic voting application. Chaum's work on code voting assumed voting codes are physically delivered to voters using the mail system, implicitly requiring to trust the mail system. This is not necessarily a valid assumption to make - especially if the mail system cannot be trusted. When conspiring with the recipient of the cast ballots, privacy is broken. It is clear to the public that when it comes to privacy, computers and "secure" communication over the Internet cannot …
Cloud computing offers resource-constrained users big-volume data storage and energy-consuming complicated computation. However, owing to the lack of full trust in the cloud, the cloud users prefer privacy-preserving outsourced data computation with correctness verification. However, cryptography-based schemes introduce high computational costs to both the cloud and its users for verifiable computation with privacy preservation, which makes it difficult to support complicated computations in practice. Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) as a trusted execution environment is widely researched…
Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University（伊玛目阿卜杜勒拉赫曼·本·费萨尔大学）；North Orissa University（北奥里萨大学）
Smart city improved the quality of life for the citizens by implementing information communication technology (ICT) such as the internet of things (IoT). Nevertheless, the smart city is a critical environment that needs to secure it is network and data from intrusions and attacks. This work proposes a hybrid deep learning (DL) model for cyber threat intelligence (CTI) to improve threats classification performance based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and quasi-recurrent neural network (QRNN). We use QRNN to provide a real-time threat classification model. The evaluation results of the pr…
The increasingly widespread use of smartcards for a variety of sensitive applications, including digital signatures, creates the need to ensure and possibly certify the secure interoperability of these devices. Standard certification criteria, in particular the Common Criteria, define security requirements but do not sufficiently address the problem of interoperability. Here we consider the interoperability problem which arises when various applications interact with different smartcards through a middleware. In such a situation it is possible that a smartcard of type S receives commands that …
Fault injections are increasingly used to attack/test secure applications. In this paper, we define formal models of runtime monitors that can detect fault injections that result in test inversion attacks and arbitrary jumps in the control flow. Runtime verification monitors offer several advantages. The code implementing a monitor is small compared to the entire application code. Monitors have a formal semantics; and we prove that they effectively detect attacks. Each monitor is a module dedicated to detecting an attack and can be deployed as needed to secure the application. A monitor can ru…
GPU clouds have become a popular computing platform because of the cost of owning and maintaining high-performance computing clusters. Many cloud architectures have also been proposed to ensure a secure execution environment for guest applications by enforcing strong security policies to isolate the untrusted hypervisor from the guest virtual machines (VMs). In this paper, we study the impact of GPU chip's hardware faults on the security of cloud "trusted" execution environment using Deep Neural Network (DNN) as the underlying application. We show that transient hardware faults of GPUs can be …
Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN or SDWAN) is a modern conception and an attractive trend in network technologies. SD-WAN is defined as a specific application of software-defined networking (SDN) to WAN connections. There is growing recognition that SDN and SD-WAN technologies not only expand features, but also expose new vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, at the present time, most vendors say that SD-WAN are perfectly safe, hardened, and fully protected. The goal of this paper is to understand SD-WAN threats using practical approach. We describe basic SD-WAN features and components, in…
AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) offers protection mechanisms for virtual machines in untrusted environments through memory and register encryption. To separate security-sensitive operations from software executing on the main x86 cores, SEV leverages the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). This paper introduces a new approach to attack SEV-protected virtual machines (VMs) by targeting the AMD-SP. We present a voltage glitching attack that allows an attacker to execute custom payloads on the AMD-SPs of all microarchitectures that support SEV currently on the market (Zen 1, Zen 2, and Zen 3…
In cryptographic engineering, extensive attention has been devoted to ameliorating the performance and security of the algorithms within. Nonetheless, in the state-of-the-art, the approaches for increasing the reliability of the efficient hash functions ECHO and Fugue have not been presented to date. We propose efficient fault detection schemes by presenting closed formulations for the predicted signatures of different transformations in these algorithms. These signatures are derived to achieve low overhead for the specific transformations and can be tailored to include byte/word-wide predicte…
Fault attacks against embedded circuits enabled to define many new attack paths against secure circuits. Every attack path relies on a specific fault model which defines the type of faults that the attacker can perform. On embedded processors, a fault model consisting in an assembly instruction skip can be very useful for an attacker and has been obtained by using several fault injection means. To avoid this threat, some countermeasure schemes which rely on temporal redundancy have been proposed. Nevertheless, double fault injection in a long enough time interval is practical and can bypass th…
Hardware and software of secured embedded systems are prone to physical attacks. In particular, fault injection attacks revealed vulnerabilities on the data and the control flow allowing an attacker to break cryptographic or secured algorithms implementations. While many research studies concentrated on successful attacks on the data flow, only a few targets the instruction flow. In this paper, we focus on electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) on the control flow, especially on the instruction cache. We target the very widespread (smartphones, tablets, settop-boxes, health-industry monitors a…
We present a new approach to constructing of pseudo-random binary sequences (PRS) generators for the purpose of cryptographic data protection, secured from the perpetrator's attacks, caused by generation of masses of hardware errors and faults. The new method is based on use of linear polynomial arithmetic for the realization of systems of boolean characteristic functions of PRS' generators. "Arithmetizatio" of systems of logic formulas has allowed to apply mathematical apparatus of residue systems for multisequencing of the process of PRS generation and organizing control of computing errors,…
Federated learning is emerging as a machine learning technique that trains a model across multiple decentralized parties. It is renowned for preserving privacy as the data never leaves the computational devices, and recent approaches further enhance its privacy by hiding messages transferred in encryption. However, we found that despite the efforts, federated learning remains privacy-threatening, due to its interactive nature across different parties. In this paper, we analyze the privacy threats in industrial-level federated learning frameworks with secure computation, and reveal such threats…
Physical implementations of cryptographic algorithms leak information, which makes them vulnerable to so-called side-channel attacks. The problem of secure computation in the presence of leakage is generally known as leakage resilience. In this work, we establish a connection between leakage resilience and fault-tolerant quantum computation. We first prove that for a general leakage model, there exists a corresponding noise model in which fault tolerance implies leakage resilience. Then we show how to use constructions for fault-tolerant quantum computation to implement classical circuits that…
Secure elements physically exposed to adversaries are frequently targeted by fault attacks. These attacks can be utilized to hijack the control-flow of software allowing the attacker to bypass security measures, extract sensitive data, or gain full code execution. In this paper, we systematically analyze the threat vector of fault-induced control-flow manipulations on the open-source OpenTitan secure element. Our thorough analysis reveals that current countermeasures of this chip either induce large area overheads or still cannot prevent the attacker from exploiting the identified threats. In …
Enclaves have emerged as a particularly compelling primitive to implement trusted execution environments: strongly isolated sensitive user-mode processes in a largely untrusted software environment. While the threat models employed by various enclave systems differ, the high-level guarantees they offer are essentially the same: attestation of an enclave's initial state, as well as a guarantee of enclave integrity and privacy in the presence of an adversary. This work describes Sanctorum, a small trusted code base (TCB), consisting of a generic enclave-capable system, which is sufficient to imp…
The emergence of mobile applications to execute sensitive operations has brought a myriad of security threats to both enterprises and users. In order to benefit from the large potential in smartphones there is a need to manage the risks arising from threats, while maintaining an easy interface for the users. In this paper we investigate the use of Trusted Platform Model (TPM) 2.0 to develop a secure application for smartphones using Windows Phone 8.1. In particular, we suggest a framework based on remote attestation as a proxy to authenticate remote services, where the device is associated to …
Voltage Fault Injection (VFI), also known as power glitching, has proven to be a severe threat to real-world systems. In VFI attacks, the adversary disturbs the power-supply of the target-device forcing the device to illegitimate behavior. Various countermeasures have been proposed to address different types of fault injection attacks at different abstraction layers, either requiring to modify the underlying hardware or software/firmware at the machine instruction level. Moreover, only recently, individual chip manufacturers have started to respond to this threat by integrating countermeasures…
Multipath routing is the use of multiple potential paths through a network in order to enhance fault tolerance, optimize bandwidth use, and improve security. Selecting data flow paths based on cost addresses performance issues but ignores security threats. Attackers can disrupt the data flows by attacking the links along the paths. Denial-of-service, remote exploitation, and other such attacks launched on any single link can severely limit throughput. Networks can be secured using a secure quality of service approach in which a sender disperses data along multiple secure paths. In this secure …
Biometrics security is a dynamic research area spurred by the need to protect personal traits from threats like theft, non-authorised distribution, reuse and so on. A widely investigated solution to such threats consists in processing the biometric signals under encryption, to avoid any leakage of information towards non-authorised parties. In this paper, we propose to leverage on the superior performance of multimodal biometric recognition to improve the efficiency of a biometric-based authentication protocol operating on encrypted data under the malicious security model. In the proposed prot…
Teleoperated robots are playing an increasingly important role in military actions and medical services. In the future, remotely operated surgical robots will likely be used in more scenarios such as battlefields and emergency response. But rapidly growing applications of teleoperated surgery raise the question; what if the computer systems for these robots are attacked, taken over and even turned into weapons? Our work seeks to answer this question by systematically analyzing possible cyber security attacks against Raven II, an advanced teleoperated robotic surgery system. We identify a slew …
In this article, we describe a methodology that aims at either breaking or proving the security of CRT-RSA implementations against fault injection attacks. In the specific case-study of the BellCoRe attack, our work bridges a gap between formal proofs and implementation-level attacks. We apply our results to three implementations of CRT-RSA, namely the unprotected one, that of Shamir, and that of Aumüller et al. Our findings are that many attacks are possible on both the unprotected and the Shamir implementations, while the implementation of Aumüller et al. is resistant to all single-fault att…
Although smartcards are widely used, secure smartcard interoperability has remained a significant challenge. Usually each manufacturer provides a closed environment for their smartcard based applications including the microchip, associated firmware and application software. While the security of this "package" can be tested and certified for example based on the Common Criteria, the secure and convenient interoperability with other smartcards and smartcard applications is not guaranteed. Ideally one would have a middleware that can support various smartcards and smartcard applications. In our …
We propose a framework for the design and optimization of a secure self-optimizing, self-adapting system-on-chip (S4oC) architecture. The goal is to minimize the impact of attacks such as hardware Trojan and side-channel, by making real-time adjustments. S4oC learns to reconfigure itself, subject to various security measures and attacks, some of which possibly unknown at design time. Furthermore, the data types and patterns of the target applications, environmental conditions, and sources of variations are incorporated. S4oC is a manycore system, modeled as a four-layer graph, representing the…
A system is said to be fail-secure, sometimes confused with fail-safe, if it maintains its security requirements even in the event of some faults. Fail-secure analyses are required by some validation schemes, such as some Common Criteria or NATO certifications. However, it is an aspect of security which as been overlooked by the community. This paper attempts to shed some light on the fail-secure field of study by: giving a definition of fail-secure as used in those certification schemes, and emphasizing the differences with fail-safe; and exhibiting a first feasibility draft of a fail-secure …
Updated Standard for Secure Satellite Communications: Analysis of Satellites, Attack Vectors, Existing Standards, and Enterprise and Security Architectures
UAVs are increasingly appearing in swarms or formations to leverage cooperative behavior, forming flying ad hoc networks. These UAV-enabled networks can meet several complex mission requirements and are seen as a potential enabler for many of the emerging use-cases in future communication networks. Such networks, however, are characterized by a highly dynamic and mobile environment with no guarantee of a central network infrastructure which can cause both connectivity and security issues. While wireless mesh networks are envisioned as a solution for such scenarios, these networks come with the…
As smart bands make life more convenient and provide a positive lifestyle, many people are now using them. Since smart bands deal with private information, security design and implementation for smart band system become necessary. To make a trustworthy smart band, we must derive the security requirements of the system first, and then design the system satisfying the security requirements. In this paper, we apply threat modeling techniques such as Data Flow Diagram, STRIDE, and Attack Tree to the smart band system to identify threats and derive security requirements accordingly. Through threat …
This chapter is on the security assessment of artificial intelligence (AI) and neural network (NN) accelerators in the face of fault injection attacks. More specifically, it discusses the assets on these platforms and compares them with ones known and well-studied in the field of cryptographic systems. This is a crucial step that must be taken in order to define the threat models precisely. With respect to that, fault attacks mounted on NNs and AI accelerators are explored.
Towards Secure Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Comprehensive Review of Threats, Defenses and Benchmarks
State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing（数学工程与先进计算国家重点实验室）；Information Engineering University（信息工程大学）；Henan Key Laboratory of Information Security（河南省信息安全重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) aims to secure internet routing by creating an infrastructure where resource holders can make attestations about their resources. RPKI Certificate Authorities issue these attestations and publish them at Publication Points. Relying Party software retrieves and processes the RPKI-related data from all publication points, validates the data and makes it available to routers so they can make secure routing decisions. In this work, we create a threat model for Relying Party software, where an attacker controls a Certificate Authority and Publication Po…
Memory corruption vulnerabilities are endemic to unsafe languages, such as C, and they can even be found in safe languages that themselves are implemented in unsafe languages or linked with libraries implemented in unsafe languages. Robust compilation mitigates the threat of linking with memory-unsafe libraries. The source language is a C-like language, enriched with a notion of a component which encapsulates data and code, exposing functionality through well-defined interfaces. Robust compilation defines what security properties a component still has, even, if one or more components are compr…
The emerging threats to user privacy over the internet are increasing at an alarming rate. Signing in from an unreliable terminal into a web account may result in compromising private details of a user such as username and password, by means of keylogger software. Such software are capable of recording keystrokes secretly, via covert channels without the knowledge of the user. In this paper we propose a secure method for signing in using Quick Response (QR) codes with mobile authentication. Through this method, the user can securely sign-in into a web account by authenticating the user session…
Privacy-preservation for sensitive data has become a challenging issue in cloud computing. Threat modeling as a part of requirements engineering in secure software development provides a structured approach for identifying attacks and proposing countermeasures against the exploitation of vulnerabilities in a system . This paper describes an extension of Cloud Privacy Threat Modeling (CPTM) methodology for privacy threat modeling in relation to processing sensitive data in cloud computing environments. It describes the modeling methodology that involved applying Method Engineering to specify ch…
This paper surveys the latest on Smart Grid security. It focuses on the deep understanding of the risk in terms of threats, vulnerabilities and consequences that arise from cyber-attacks.
Pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved great success and remarkable performance over a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, there are also growing concerns regarding the potential security issues in the adoption of PTLMs. In this survey, we comprehensively systematize recently discovered threats to PTLM systems and applications. We perform our attack characterization from three interesting perspectives. (1) We show threats can occur at different stages of the PTLM pipeline raised by different malicious entities. (2) We identify two types of model transfera…
Except for the traditional threat that candidates may want to cheat, exams have historically not been seen as a serious security problem. That threat is routinely thwarted by having invigilators ensure that candidates do not misbehave during testing. However, as recent exam scandals confirm, also invigilators and exam authorities may have interest in frauds, hence they may pose security threats as well. Moreover, new security issues arise from the recent use of computers, which can facilitate the exam experience for example by allowing candidates to register from home. Thus, exams must be desi…
