MAFIA: Protecting the microarchitecture of embedded systems against fault injection attacks

Thomas Chamelot (1) , Damien Courousse (1) , Karine Heydemann (2)

1 LFIM - Laboratoire Fonctions Innovantes pour circuits Mixtes
2 ALSOC - Architecture et Logiciels pour Systèmes Embarqués sur Puce

Fault injection attacks represent an effective threat to embedded systems. Recently, Laurent et al. have reported that fault injection attacks can leverage faults inside the microarchi- tecture. However, state-of-the-art counter-measures, hardware- only or with hardware support, do not consider the integrity of microarchitecture control signals that are the target of these faults. We present MAFIA, a microarchitecture protection against fault injection attacks. MAFIA ensures integrity of pipeline control signals through a signature-based mechanism, and en- sures fine-grained control-flow integrity with a complete indirect branch support and code authenticity. We analyse the security properties of two different implementations with different secu- rity/overhead trade-offs: one with a CBC-MAC/Prince signature function, and another one with a CRC32. We present our implementation of MAFIA in a RISC-V processor, supported by a dedicated compiler toolchain based on LLVM/Clang. We report a hardware area overhead of 23.8 % and 6.5 % for the CBC-MAC/Prince and CRC32 respectively. The average code size and execution time overheads are 29.4 % and 18.4 % respectively for the CRC32 implementation and are 50 % and 39 % for the CBC-MAC/Prince.

Keywords: fault injection attacks; code integrity; control-flow integrity; control-signal integrity; code authenticity; control logic; counter-measures; Codes; Circuit faults; Microarchitecture; Process control; Security; Hardware; Pipelines

Domains: Hardware Architecture [cs.AR]; Cryptography and Security [cs.CR]

Thomas Chamelot, Damien Courousse, Karine Heydemann. MAFIA: Protecting the microarchitecture of embedded systems against fault injection attacks. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 2023, ⟨10.1109/TCAD.2023.3276507⟩. ⟨cea-04099414⟩