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

Abstract — With the increasing complexity of digital applications, the use of variable-length instruction sets became essential, in order to achieve higher code density and thus better performance. However, security aspects must always be considered, in particular with the significant improvement of attack techniques and equipment. Fault injection, in particular, is among the most interesting and promising attack techniques thanks to the recent advancements. In this article, we provide proper characterization, at the instruction set architecture (ISA) level, for several faulty behaviors that can be obtained when targeting a variable-length instruction set. We take into account the binary encoding of instructions, and show how the obtained behaviors depend on the alignment of the instructions in the memory. Moreover, we are also able to give a better insight on previous results from the literature, that were still partially unexplained. We also show how the observed behaviors can be exploited in various security contexts. »

This publication and Ihab's thesis are part of the CLAM (Cross-Layer Fault Analysis for Microprocessor Architectures) project. The goal of this project is to propose solutions to evaluate vulnerabilities at the material level very early on in the design flow, in order to propose optimized countermeasures that are effective and cost-efficient.

This project, which is starting its third and final year, is funded by the labex Persyval-Lab as part of the "Equipe Action" call for projects. It involves three laboratories at the UGA: Verimag, Tima, and LCIS. The project is also being carried out in collaboration with ARM.

Vincent Beroulle, a professor at Grenoble INP – UGA at the LCIS, is responsible for this project.