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  • This session has been presented May 10, 2019.

Description

  • Speaker

    Ronan Lashermes

Electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) is a well known technique to disturb the behavior of a chip and weaken its security. These attacks are still mostly done on simple microcontrollers since the fault effects is relatively simple and understood.
Unlocking EMFI on modern System-on-Chips (SoCs), the fast and complex chips ubiquitous today, requires to understand the impact of the faults. In this paper, we target the BCM2837 SoC with four Cortex-A53 cores from ARM. We propose an experimental setup and a forensic process to create exploitable faults and assess their impact on the micro-architecture.
The observed behaviors are radically different to what was previously obtained on microcontrollers. Subsystems (L1 caches, L2 cache, memory management unit (MMU)) can be individually targeted leading to new fault models. We highlight the differences in the fault impact with or without an Operating system (OS), therefore showing the importance of the software layers in the exploitation of a fault. The complexity and speed of a SoC does not protect them against hardware attackers, quite the contrary.
After describing the effect of faults on SoC caches and MMU, we propose countermeasures to protect the system against EMFI attacks.

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