1.
xDEFENSE:An Extended DEFENSE for mitigating
Next Generation Intrusions
James Lamberti, Devu Manikantan Shila andVivekVenugopal
• Hardware Trojan Threats (HTTs) are
virus-like stealthy malicious components
that can infect the Integrated Circuit
(IC).
• Various stages of an IC lifecycle are
vulnerable to attacks due to the
outsourcing of design and manufacture.
• Majority of the ASICs and FPGAs
fabricated in China and Taiwan (Source:
DARPA)
[1] M.Abramovici and P. Bradley.“Integrated circuit security: new threats and solutions”. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual
Workshop on Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research: Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Challenges and
Strategies, page 55.ACM, 2009.
[2] T. Huffmire,et. al,“Moats and drawbridges:An isolation primitive for reconfigurable hardware based systems,” in
Security and Privacy, 2007. SP ’07. IEEE Symposium on, May 2007, pp. 281–295.
Implementation and Results
• Our results manifest that using
power, the hardware Trojans remained
undetected.
• Using timing and resource utilization,
the message spoofing and the denial of
service HTTs indicated a visible change
from the golden model, thus increasing
it’s detection rate.
• We implement an architectural
refinement in the form of a trusted
anchor for embedding user-defined
policies that prevents HTTs from
activating within the system.
• The Trusted Anchor incurs a latency
cost for the secure handshake
protocol and utilizes more resources
for the monitoring logic.
Conclusion
References
Background work
• DEFENSE improves bus guarding and scrambling techniques by adding
hardware to provide real-time security monitoring.
• RETC-CPS is an extension of DEFENSE, where a firewall constantly
checks the model behavior against a set of user-defined security policies.
• A classic Root of Trust (RoT) design consists of a secure memory and a
key guard. The authorized module is allowed to access the contents of
memory only via a guard module. However, this RoT can be
compromised with the presence of a Man-In-The-Middle attack by a
hardware Trojan.
• The Trusted Anchor is configured with the following set of policies
related to information leakage: (1) Unauthorized IP cores are restricted
from memory access, (2) The key is never allowed to leave an IP core via
IP core-IP core or IP core-I/O links.
•The Trusted Anchor monitors the communication links for any violation
of these policies and if detected, it will reset the device or perform
memory/key zeroization.
Introduction
Address
Logic
Address
Logic
Response
Generator
Challenge
Generator
Encryption
Response
Generator
Memory
Authorized module Unauthorized module Guard module
Man-In-
The-
Middle
HTT
Unknown
USA
Europe
Asia
USA
Europe
Asia
FPGA manufacturing locations ASIC manufacturing locations
• Also, in the RoT testbed, an
unauthorized module can access the
key from the authorized module,
which remains undetected.
• Both DEFENSE and RETC do not
address spoofing attacks, as there is
no security built into it.
Trusted
Anchor
Unauthorized
IP
Memory
Secure
handshake
Trusted module
I/O
Authorized IP
I/O
Secure
handshake
Reset
key leakage
no key leakage
monitor
Root of Trust with a Man-In-The-Middle HTT
ChangefromtheGoldenmodel
-1
-0.75
-0.5
-0.25
0
0.25
0.5
0.75
1
Timing Resource
Beat the RoT (Denial of Service)
Beat the RoT (Message Spoofing)