Cyber Deception for Proactive Defense Against Physical Attacks

Modern system-on-chip circuits (SoCs) handle sensitive assets like keys, proprietary firmware, top secret data, etc. Attacks against SoCs may arise from malicious or vulnerable software, the hardware itself (e.g., hardware Trojans), and physical attacks against hardware (side channel analysis, fault injection, optical probing, microprobing, and circuit edit). Recently, cyber-attacks that exploit physical vulnerabilities have been successfully performed against commercial chips, e.g., to remotely extract keys from TrustZone in ARM/Android devices, to breach confidentiality and integrity of Intel SGX and AMD SEV, and more. These exploits demonstrate that existing solutions are not enough. Further, given the static and long-lived nature of hardware, it can be argued that compromise by physical attacks is inevitable.