ReFID: A System-Aware Remote Fault-Injection Attack Detection & Mitigation for Secure Heterogeneous System

As the semiconductor industry adopts system-in-package (SiP) technologies to address the limitations of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling, the increasing complexity of heterogeneous integration (HI) makes efficient physical fault injection attacks much more challenging to execute. Hence, skilled attackers attempt to compromise the device's confidentiality, integrity, or availability through remote fault-injection (RFI) attacks without physical access to the target system. In this case, this transformative shift of the threat models and evolving threats associated with RFI attacks render the traditional countermeasures incompatible. To overcome these challenges, we propose ReFID, a system-wide RFI attack detection and mitigation strategy for heterogeneous systems, by placing on-chip sensors and developing a system-level root-of-trust (RoT) module. The RoT module implemented as an embedded FPGA (e-FPGA) controls the sensors and analyzes the run-time sensor data to detect malicious activities within a trusted region of a heterogeneous system caused by remote attacks. Upon detecting any fault, it immediately creates uncontrollable scenarios to prevent an attacker from exploiting the impact of an RFI attack. We execute a combination of remote overclocking and undervolting attacks on a crypto application within the trusted execution environment of a CPU-FPGA heterogeneous system to showcase the ReFID's efficacy.