DATE: Defense Against TEmperature Side-Channel Attacks in DVFS Enabled MPSoCs
This addresses security and reliability issues for embedded systems, but appears incremental as it builds on existing defenses against side-channel attacks.
The paper tackles temperature side-channel attacks in DVFS-enabled MPSoCs by proposing DATE, a method to reduce thermal gradients, resulting in up to 139.24% increased security and up to 67.42% reduced thermal cycles.
Given the constant rise in utilizing embedded devices in daily life, side channels remain a challenge to information flow control and security in such systems. One such important security flaw could be exploited through temperature side-channel attacks, where heat dissipation and propagation from the processing elements are observed over time in order to deduce security flaws. In our proposed methodology, DATE: Defense Against TEmperature side-channel attacks, we propose a novel approach of reducing spatial and temporal thermal gradient, which makes the system more secure against temperature side-channel attacks, and at the same time increases the reliability of the device in terms of lifespan. In this paper, we have also introduced a new metric, Thermal-Security-in-Multi-Processors (TSMP), which is capable of quantifying the security against temperature side-channel attacks on computing systems, and DATE is evaluated to be 139.24% more secure at the most for certain applications than the state-of-the-art, while reducing thermal cycle by 67.42% at the most.