Experimental evaluation of RISC-V micro-architecture against fault injection attack

Abstract

Today, the use of embedded processors is increasing dramatically and they are used in all aspects from our daily life to security applications. Physical access to hardware has made the hardware security a major concern. Hardware attacks compromise the hardware security by physically accessing target devices. Among the available techniques for hardware attacks, Fault Injection Attacks (FIAs), such as clock glitching, are one of the most harmful types of non-invasive attacks that can disrupt the operation of an embedded system. Thus, it will be important and fundamental to evaluate embedded software programs before using them in critical applications and check their vulnerability against fault injection attacks. However, it is often difficult for software developers to assess vulnerabilities. In this paper, an easy-to-use platform is presented to facilitate the process of evaluating the vulnerability of programs running on embedded processors against clock glitching attacks. Our experimental results show the vulnerability window of RISC-V micro-architecture for different high-level C-functions. The results of this research can help the developers of embedded systems that are used in security applications to evaluate their system against clock glitching attacks with the least cost in a short time.