Title
Breaking TrustZone memory isolation and secure boot through malicious hardware on a modern FPGA-SoC
Abstract
FPGA-SoCs are heterogeneous embedded computing platforms consisting of reconfigurable hardware and high-performance processing units. This combination offers flexibility and good performance for the design of embedded systems. However, allowing the sharing of resources between an FPGA and an embedded CPU enables possible attacks from one system on the other. This work demonstrates that a malicious hardware block contained inside the reconfigurable logic can manipulate the memory and peripherals of the CPU. Previous works have already considered direct memory access attacks from malicious logic on platforms containing no memory isolation mechanism. In this work, such attacks are investigated on a modern platform which contains state-of-the-art memory and peripherals isolation mechanisms. We demonstrate two attacks capable of compromising a Trusted Execution Environment based on ARM TrustZone and show a new attack capable of bypassing the secure boot configuration set by a device owner via the manipulation of Battery-Backed RAM and eFuses from malicious logic.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/s13389-021-00273-8
Journal of Cryptographic Engineering
Keywords
DocType
Volume
FPGA-SoCs, Memory and peripherals isolation, Hardware trojan, DMA attack, Trusted execution environment, Secure boot
Journal
12
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
2190-8508
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
1
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mathieu Gross100.34
Nisha Jacob200.34
Andreas Zankl300.34
Georg Sigl444762.13