New technique uses power anomalies to ID malware in embedded systems

Eurekalert  April 25, 2019
Micro-Architectural attacks have recently come to prominence since they break all existing software-isolation based security by hammering memory rows to gain root privileges or by abusing speculative execution and shared hardware to leak secret data. Researchers at North Carolina State University use anomalies in an embedded system’s power trace to detect evasive micro-architectural attacks. To this end, they introduced power-mimicking micro-architectural attacks to study their evasiveness. They showed that rowhammer attacks cannot evade detection while covert channel and speculation-driven attacks can evade detection. The detector can be embedded into programmable batteries. They have shown that power-anomalies are a simple and effective defense for embedded systems. The technique can help future-proof embedded systems against vulnerabilities that are likely to emerge as new hardware like phase-change memories and accelerators become mainstream…read more.