Security News > 2022 > August > Intel increases its arsenal against physical hardware attacks

The security community is so focused on attacks relying on software that it often forgets that physical attacks are possible.

Physical attacks are also often seen as an attacker having the capability to physically access the targeted computer and then use some hardware to compromise the computer.

What is a TRC? TRC uses hardware-based sensors to explicitly detect circuit-based timing failures that occur as the result of an attack, the attack being a non-invasive physical glitch on the pins supplying clock and voltage.

Fault injection attacks allow an attacker to cause a NOP instruction to be latched instead of a JMP condition, altering the execution flow.

In the released paper from Intel's Sr. Principal Engineer Daniel Nemiroff and Principal Engineer Carlos Tokunaga, they warn that "With the hardening of software vulnerabilities through the use of virtualization, stack canaries, authenticating code before execution, etc., attackers have turned their attention to physically attacking computing platforms. A favorite tool of these attackers is fault injection attacks via glitching voltage, clock pins, to cause circuits to fail timing, resulting in the execution of malicious instructions, exfiltration of secrets, etc."

The answer to that question is difficult since there is no real literature on the topic, yet researchers have indicated that those attacks are possible and often using injection devices that are below the thousand dollar mark.

News URL

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/intel-increases-its-arsenal-against-physical-hardware-attacks/