Selective Noise Based Power-Efficient and Effective Countermeasure against Thermal Covert Channel Attacks in Multi-Core Systems

Abstract

With increasing interest in multi-core systems, such as any communication systems, infra-structures can become targets for information leakages via covert channel communication. Covert channel attacks lead to leaking secret information and data. To design countermeasures against these threats, we need to have good knowledge about classes of covert channel attacks along with their properties. Temperature–based covert communication channel, known as Thermal Covert Channel (TCC), can pose a threat to the security of critical information and data. In this paper, we present a novel scheme against such TCC attacks. The scheme adds selective noise to the thermal signal so that any possible TCC attack can be wiped out. The noise addition only happens at instances when there are chances of correct information exchange to increase the bit error rate (BER) and keep the power consumption low. Our experiments have illustrated that the BER of a TCC attack can increase to 94% while having similar power consumption as that of state-of-the-art.

Keywords

• selective noise
• multi-core systems
• thermal covert channel
• countermeasure
• attack detection