Security News > 2022 > August > Intel ups protection against physical chip attacks in Alder Lake

Intel has disclosed how it may be able to protect systems against some physical threats by repurposing circuitry originally designed to counter variations in voltage and timing that may occur as silicon circuits age.

According to Intel, adding the TRC brings fault injection detection technology to the Converged Security and Management Engine, a part of the Platform Controller Hub chipset in Alder Lake.

Intel concedes that the protection offered by this new feature is against non‐invasive fault injection attacks, those where an attacker attempts glitch attacks using the physical clock and power pins on the chip package, rather than modifying or cutting open the package itself to directly access the silicon.

This feature "Raises the bar" on security and "Allows us to claim fairly significant physical attack protection for at least the CSME subsystem, which is of pretty significant interest to our customers and our partners," said Intel senior principal engineer Daniel Nemiroff, speaking in an Intel Chips & Salsa video blog covering the Black Hat 2022 presentation.

The TRC logic is integrated into the system agent partition of the CSME and monitors the power and clock coming into the CSME. If it detects a glitch, it invokes countermeasures that result in a CSME reset, Intel said, without affecting the rest of the PCH chip.

Intel's slides from the Black Hat presentation are available here [PDF], while more details of the fault-injection detection technology are available in an Intel whitepaper available here [PDF].

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