Design and Evaluation of a Detection Module for Microarchitectural Attacks in MPSoC Platform

Background

Microarchitectural attacks exploit more on the microarchitectural behavior of modern computers and evade from the conventional side-channel attack (Fig. 1) to the covert-channel attack (Fig. 2.a). Referring to Fig. 1, an attempted attack is originated in an app, and it may exploit the content of a cache. Alternatively, an intrusion/attack  shown in Fig. 2.a may exist in a CAD tool, and detection or a countermeasure to the mentioned attack will be implemented in the platform.

Tasks

• Get to know our existing implemented designs
• Design, simulate, and implement a detection (and countermeasure) module using C/C++, or RTL code
• Improve the performance of detection or countermeasure method with classical Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) approaches

Requirements

• Student of electrical engineering or computer science
• Basic C/C++ language programming skills
• Knowledge and basic experience in RTL coding using VHDL or Verilog
• Have a strong interest in the implementation of hardware security and basic AI/ML