Detection and Localization of Hardware-Assisted Intermittent Power Attacks in Mixed-Critical Systems

Increasing complexity in power management (PMT) has led to a growing demand for third-party power managers (3PPMs) in Network-on-Chip based Mixed-Critical Systems (NoCMCS). However, a malicious 3PPM can exploit the interdependence of power amongst the router nodes to orchestrate well-structured, covert power attacks. Detection and localization of a malicious 3PPM is crucial to restore standard dynamic PMT and mitigating system performance degradation. We propose a novel, non-invasive, low-overhead, attack detection and localization framework for Hardware Trojan (HT)-assisted intermittent power attacks with random activation and deactivation phases in NoCMCS. In Phase-I, our framework makes use of pre-profiled thermal statistics of router nodes to detect any anomaly at runtime. In Phase-II, it leverages a self-aware methodology to locate the router nodes with malicious 3PPM. The proposed framework can detect multiple intermittent HTs in the network. Experimental evaluations on real-life benchmarks show that Phase-I of our framework is able to consolidate the search space of malicious nodes, reducing almost 90% of Phase-II’s computational workload. Phase-II localizes the malicious router nodes across various experimental scenarios with zero false positives. We also demonstrate the robustness of our framework for detecting and localizing malicious router nodes for different intermittent HTs with varying burst attacks over time.