Automatic Application of Software Countermeasures Against Physical Attacks

Abstract

While the number of embedded systems is continuously increasing, securing software against physical attacks is costly and error-prone. Several works proposed solutions that automatically insert protections against these attacks in order to reduce this cost and this risk of error. In this paper, we present a survey of existing approaches, and classify them by the level at which they apply the countermeasure. We consider three different levels: the source code level, the compilation level and the assembly/binary level. We explain the advantages and disadvantages of each level considering different criteria. Finally, we encourage future works to take compilation into account when designing tools, to consider the problem of combining countermeasures, as well as the interactions between countermeasures and compiler optimisa-

A Compositional Methodology to Harden Programs Against Multi-Fault Attacks

“…• condition 1: all n-successful attack paths of P are detected in P ; • condition 2: P should not introduce new attack path at order less or equal than n. For instance the naive placement algorithm (Table V) protects all IPs in the program P with a vulnerability level of at least n + 1. This algorithm generalizes, in the context of robustness of order n, the approach implemented in many systematic countermeasures placement tools [24], [5], [19] against 1-fault. Proposition 1 holds in this case since no injection point of P can be bypassed in less than n + 1 faults (whatever is the attack objective S).…”

“…There exist tools adding countermeasures, generally at compilation-time. They are dedicated to particular fault models (data modification, instruction skip, flow integrity) [17], [26], [5], for instance by adding redundant checks or duplicating idempotent instructions. Nevertheless these tools generally target single fault robustness, where countermeasures themselves cannot be faulted.…”