Biblio

Code reuse techniques can circumvent existing security measures. For example, attacks such as Return Oriented Programming (ROP) use fragments of the existing code base to create an attack. Since this code is already in the system, the Data Execution Prevention methods cannot prevent the execution of this reorganised code. Existing software-based Control Flow Integrity can prevent this attack, but the overhead is enormous. Most of the improved methods utilise reduced granularity in exchange for a small performance overhead. Hardware-based detection also faces the same performance overhead and accuracy issues. Benefit from HPC's large-area loading on modern CPU chips, we propose a detection method based on the monitoring of hardware performance counters, which is a lightweight system-level detection for malicious code execution to solve the restrictions of other software and hardware security measures, and is not as complicated as Control Flow Integrity.

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been designed for many security applications such as identification, authentication of devices and key generation, especially for lightweight electronics. Traditional approaches to enhancing security, such as hash functions, may be expensive and resource dependent. However, modelling attacks using machine learning (ML) show the vulnerability of most PUFs. In this paper, a combination of a 32-bit current mirror and 16-bit arbiter PUFs in 65nm CMOS technology is proposed to improve resilience against modelling attacks. Both PUFs are vulnerable to machine learning attacks and we reduce the output prediction rate from 99.2% and 98.8% individually, to 60%.

Building lightweight security for low-cost pervasive devices is a major challenge considering the design requirements of a small footprint and low power consumption. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as a promising technology to provide a low-cost authentication for such devices. By exploiting intrinsic manufacturing process variations, PUFs are able to generate unique and apparently random chip identifiers. Strong-PUFs represent a variant of PUFs that have been suggested for lightweight authentication applications. Unfortunately, many of the Strong-PUFs have been shown to be susceptible to modelling attacks (i.e., using machine learning techniques) in which an adversary has access to challenge and response pairs. In this study, we propose an obfuscation technique during post-processing of Strong-PUF responses to increase the resilience against machine learning attacks. We conduct machine learning experiments using Support Vector Machines and Artificial Neural Networks on two Strong-PUFs: a 32-bit Arbiter-PUF and a 2-XOR 32-bit Arbiter-PUF. The predictability of the 32-bit Arbiter-PUF is reduced to $\approx$ 70% by using an obfuscation technique. Combining the obfuscation technique with 2-XOR 32-bit Arbiter-PUF helps to reduce the predictability to $\approx$ 64%. More reduction in predictability has been observed in an XOR Arbiter-PUF because this PUF architecture has a good uniformity. The area overhead with an obfuscation technique consumes only 788 and 1080 gate equivalents for the 32-bit Arbiter-PUF and 2-XOR 32-bit Arbiter-PUF, respectively.