SCI-FI: Control Signal, Code, and Control Flow Integrity against Fault Injection Attacks

Thomas Chamelot1,a, Damien Couroussé1,b and Karine Heydemann2
1Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CEA, List, F-38000 Grenoble, France
athomas.chamelot@cea.fr
bdamien.courousse@cea.fr
2Sorbonne Université, CNRS, LIP6, F-75005 Paris, France
karine.heydemann@lip6.fr

ABSTRACT


Fault injection attacks have become a serious threat against embedded systems. Recently, Laurent et al. have reported that some faults inside the microarchitecture escape all typical software fault models and so software counter-measures. Moreover, state-of-the-art counter-measures, hardware-only or with hardware support, do not consider the integrity of microarchitectural control signals that are the target of these faults. We present SCI-FI, a counter-measure for Control Signal, Code, and Control-Flow Integrity against Fault Injection attacks. SCI-FI combines the protection of pipeline control signals with a fine-grained code and control-flow integrity mechanism, and can additionally provide code authentication. We evaluate SCIFI by extending a RISC-V core. The average hardware area overheads range from 6.5% to 23.8%, and the average code size and execution time increase by 25.4% and 17.5% respectively.

Keywords: Fault Injection Attacks, Code Integrity, Controlflow Integrity, Execution Integrity, Control Logic, Counter-Measures.



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