Paper Info
Title
PMU-Trojan: On exploiting power management side channel for information leakage.
Abstract
Hardware Trojans are malicious, undesired, intentional modifications introduced in an Integrated Circuit (IC) which can be leveraged by a knowledgeable adversary to compromise the security of the IC. Trojans might be designed to modify the functionality of an IC, access sensitive information or even disable or destroy a system. In this paper, we propose PMU-Trojan, a hardware Trojan for leaking confidential information, such as, cryptographic secret key covertly to an adversary. For information leakage by hardware Trojan, we exploit a backdoor created by Power Management Unit (PMU) in Multi Processor System on Chip (MPSoC). PMU is a system block responsible for initiating voltage and the frequency changes to facilitate flexible power management and energy efficiency. It transmits voltage level change request to power supply. In this paper we leverage this facility as an information side-channel to leak information to power-supply co-tenants. While the proposed approach is general and can be applied for any kind of secret information leakage, for the purpose of illustration, in this study, we focus on leaking Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) key. We demonstrate the working principle of this system in Linux environment where a co-tenant thread monitors the voltage level and receives side-channel information from a thread affected by the Trojan. This scheme also defeats Differential Power Analysis (DPA) based Trojan detection due to low information bit rate spread over long duration by a Trojan unit dissipating power at mere pico-Watts level.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2018
ASP-DAC
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) key, Hardware Trojan Horse (HTH), Power Management Unit (PMU), Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), Data center
Field
DocType
ISSN
Power analysis,Power management,Hardware Trojan,Information leakage,Computer science,Real-time computing,Backdoor,Side channel attack,Trojan,Power Management Unit,Embedded system
Conference
2153-6961
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Md. Nazmul Islam143.15
Sandip Kundu21103137.18