Combating Enhanced Thermal Covert Channel in Multi-/Many-Core Systems with Channel-Aware Jamming

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2-2020

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems

Volume

39

Issue

11

First page number:

3276

Last page number:

3287

Abstract

As a means to thwart thermal covert channel attack in a multi-/many-core system, a strong heat noise whose frequency band coincides with that occupied by the thermal covert channel is injected to jam the channel. However, this undiscriminating channel jamming-based countermeasure will fail if a thermal covert channel is allowed to change its transmission frequency dynamically in response to the jamming. To combat this enhanced thermal covert channel, a more advanced countermeasure is needed and thus proposed that checks the frequency spectrum and tracks any possible covert channel. Only after a channel is detected to be susceptible, a thermal noise with this channel frequency is then emitted to jam the covert channel. The communication protocols and frequency changing scheme pertaining to this enhanced thermal covert channel are described in this article. The experimental results confirm that, when the proposed countermeasure is applied, the enhanced thermal covert channel, much more resilient to jamming, suffers from an extremely high packet error rate (PER), which makes any meaningful data leakage practically impossible. As the proposed countermeasure method is poised to contain dangerous thermal covert channel attacks with an anti-jamming capability, it lends itself well to secure multi-/many-core systems.

Keywords

Defense against covert channel attack; Many core systems; Signal detection; Thermal covert channel

Disciplines

Electrical and Computer Engineering | Engineering | Systems and Communications | VLSI and Circuits, Embedded and Hardware Systems

Language

English

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