A Case Study on Hardware Trojan: Cache Coherence-Exploiting DoS Attack

하드웨어 Trojan 사례 연구: 캐시 일관성 규약을 악용한 DoS 공격

The increasing complexity of integrated circuits and IP-based hardware designs have created the risk of hardware Trojans. This paper introduces a new type of threat, the coherence-exploiting hardware Trojan. This Trojan can be maliciously implanted in master components in a system, and continuously injects memory read transactions on to bus or main interconnect. The injected traffic forces the eviction of cache lines, taking advantage of cache coherence protocols. This type of Trojans insidiously slows down the system performance, incurring Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. We used Xilinx Zynq-7000 device to implement and evaluate the coherence-exploiting Trojan. The malicious traffic was injected through the AXI ACP interface in Zynq-7000. Then, we collected the L2 cache eviction statistics with performance counters. The experiment results reveal the severe threats of the Trojan to the system performance.