The "Best Paper Award" goes to...Ihab Alshaer

The paper presented had the title: "Microarchitectural Insights into Unexplained Behaviors under Clock Glitch Fault Injection"

Abstract — With the widespread use of embedded system devices, hardware designers and software developers started paying more attention to
security issues in order to protect these devices from potential threats. Physical attacks represent an important threat to these devices, and fault injection is one of the major physical attacks. However, misunderstanding the effects of the fault injection would lead to proposing either over-protections or under-protections for these devices, thus affecting the performance/cost ratio and/or the security of the device. In this article, we provide a better representation of occurring fault, as a result of clock glitch, through novel models, in order to better understand the effects of fault injection. Also, we examine their dependencies with respect to the target device and the target program. Finally, we make use of the presented fault models to break the control-flow integrity of a program by altering the value of the program counter, in order to provide an actual application example.

This publication and Ihab's thesis (defended on October 16th, 2023) are part of the CLAM project (Cross-Layer Fault Analysis for Microprocessor Architectures). The goal of this project is to propose solutions for evaluating vulnerabilities at an early stage in the design flow in order to offer optimized countermeasures that are effective and cost-effective.

This project is funded by the Persyval-Lab labex as part of the "Team Action" call for projects. It involves 3 laboratories from the UGA: Verimag, Tima, and LCIS. The project is also carried out in collaboration with ARM. Vincent Beroulle, professor at Grenoble INP – UGA at the LCIS, is responsible for this project.