Hardware Covert Attacks and Countermeasures

Abstract

Computing platforms deployed in many critical infrastructures, such as smart grid, financial systems, governmental organizations etc., are subjected to security attacks and potentially devastating consequences. Computing platforms often get attacked 'physically' by an intruder accessing stored information, studying the internal structure of the hardware or injecting a fault. Even if the attackers fail to gain sensitive information stored in hardware, they may be able to disrupt the hardware or deny service leading to other kinds of security failures in the system. Hardware attacks could be covert or overt, based on the awareness of the intended system. This work classifies existing hardware attacks. Focusing mainly on covert attacks, they are quantified using a proposed schema. Different countermeasure techniques are proposed to prevent such attacks.

Analyzing Threats and Attacks in Edge Data Analytics within IoT Environments

“…A hardware attack's main intention is to disrupt the normal working of the hardware or deny services, leading to system security failures [64].…”

Generalizing Supervised Learning for Intrusion Detection in IoT Mesh Networks

“…LLNs face two main security challenges. The first challenge is node removal or attacks on nodes' hardware [20]. Second, there are a large number of attacks at the network layer that include Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, sinkhole, blackhole, hello flooding, clone ID, local repair, sybil, and selective forwarding attacks [21,28].…”