On Countermeasures Against the Thermal Covert Channel Attacks Targeting Many-core Systems

Huang, Hengli; Wang, Xiaohang; Jiang, Yingtao; Singh, Amit Kumar; Yang, Mei; Huang, Letian

doi:10.1109/dac18072.2020.9218648

Cited by 14 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The state-of-the-art countermeasures against TCC attacks proposed in [6], [7], [13] rely on the use of thresholdbased detection approaches to detect the existence of a TCC. Specifically, the threshold-based detection requires scanning of the frequency spectrum, and a TCC attack is deemed to be present if the signal amplitude is higher than the threshold.…”

Section: B Tcc Detection Methods and Coutermeasuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Once a TCC is detected, a jamming noise whose transmission frequency matches the detected TCC is emitted to block the TCC transmission [6]. 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.…”

Section: B Tcc Detection Methods and Coutermeasuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Once all the data are transmitted, the transmitter sends an END packet to the receiver to terminate the transmission. [6] and [7] can no longer detect the improved stealthy TCCs. Fig.…”

Section: B Transmitting the Bit Streamsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To counter thermal covert channel attacks, recently, a couple of countermeasures [6], [7] have been proposed. In [6], strong noise whose spectrum matches that of the detected thermal covert channel is emitted to jam the data transmission.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [6], strong noise whose spectrum matches that of the detected thermal covert channel is emitted to jam the data transmission. In [7], Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is applied to any core identified as the TCC transceiver to block the TCC traffic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

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.

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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.

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Section: B Tcc Detection Methods and Coutermeasuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Tcc Detection Methods and Coutermeasuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Once all the data are transmitted, the transmitter sends an END packet to the receiver to terminate the transmission. [6] and [7] can no longer detect the improved stealthy TCCs. Fig.…”

Section: B Transmitting the Bit Streamsmentioning

confidence: 99%