MASc Seminar: Embedded Systems Security: On EM Fault Injection on RISC-V

Candidate: Mahmoud Aly Ibrahim Mohamed Elmohr

Title: Embedded Systems Security: On EM Fault Injection on RISC-V 

Date: January 22, 2020

Time: 10:00 AM

Place: EIT 3141

Supervisor(s): Gebotys, Catherine H.

Abstract:

With the increased usage of embedded computers in modern life and the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), embedded systems security has become a real concern. Especially with safety-critical systems or with devices that communicate sensitive data, security becomes a critical issue. Embedded computers more than others are vulnerable to hardware attacks that target the chips themselves to extract the cryptographic keys, compromise their security, or counterfeit them.  

In this seminar, we discuss the study of Electro Magnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) on a RISC-V processor, where experiments on a

320 MHz five-stage pipeline RISC-V core showed that with the increase of frequency and decrease of supplied voltage, the processor becomes more susceptible to EMFI. Analysis of the effect of EMFI on different types of instructions including arithmetic and logic operations, memory operations, and flow control operations showed different types of faults including instruction skips, instructions corruption, faulted branches, and exception faults with variant probabilities. More interestingly and for the first time, multiple consecutive instructions (up to six instructions) were empirically shown to be faulted at once, which can be very devastating, compromising the effect of software countermeasures such as instruction duplication or triplication.