Zhou Wanting, Ye Kuo-Hui, Yuan Shiwei, Li Lei
Research Institute of Electronic Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, No. 2006, Xi Yuan Ave., West High-Tech Zone, Chengdu, 611731, Sichuan, China.
Department of Information Management, National Dong Hwa University, No. 1, Sec. 2, Da Hsueh Rd., Shoufeng, Hualien, 97001, Taiwan (Province of China).
Heliyon. 2023 Jun 13;9(6):e17085. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17085. eCollection 2023 Jun.
As the core of Internet of Things (IoT), embedded processors are being used more and more extensive. However, embedded processors face various hardware security issues such as hardware trojans (HT) and code tamper attacks. In this paper, a cycle-level recovery method for embedded processor against HT tamper is proposed, which builds two hardware-implementation units, a General-Purpose Register (GPRs) backup unit and a PC rollback unit. Once a HT tamper is detected, the two units will carry out fast recovery through rolling back to the exact PC address corresponding to the wrong instruction and resuming the instruction execution. An open RISC-V core of PULPino is adopted for recovery mechanism verification, the experimental results and hardware costs show that the proposed method could guarantee the processor restore from abnormal state in real time with a reasonable hardware overhead.
作为物联网（IoT）的核心，嵌入式处理器的应用越来越广泛。然而，嵌入式处理器面临着各种硬件安全问题，如硬件木马（HT）和代码篡改攻击。本文提出了一种针对嵌入式处理器HT篡改的周期级恢复方法，该方法构建了两个硬件实现单元，即通用寄存器（GPRs）备份单元和程序计数器回滚单元。一旦检测到HT篡改，这两个单元将通过回滚到与错误指令对应的精确程序计数器地址并恢复指令执行来进行快速恢复。采用开源的PULPino的RISC-V内核进行恢复机制验证，实验结果和硬件成本表明，该方法能够以合理的硬件开销保证处理器从异常状态实时恢复。
