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Intel Achieves Major Advance in Protection Against Physical Threats with Tunable Replica Circuit

A few months ago we talked to you in this article about the Intel iSTARE initiative, a very important project with which the chip giant reinforced its commitment to security at the hardware level, and to deal with attacks even before they occur. . You already know that, in the end, prevention is key when we talk about security in the world of technology, since through prevention we can avoid the huge cost who has the attacks so much in terms of time, infrastructure and money.

Intel continues its commitment to prevention as a central pillar in the security sectora bet that continues to bear fruit, and that is that the Santa Clara giant has presented a new hardware-based technique with which it has been able to perfectly complement the existing software mitigations at the software level to deal with attacks from fault injection.

Its about Tunable Replica Circuit or CRT, for its acronym in English. As we have said, it offers protection against fault injection, for which it uses hardware-based sensors that are capable of specifically detecting circuit-based synchronization faults that occur as a result of an attack.

The TRC has been integrated for the first time in the Intel Core Gen12 processor familywhich are also equipped with the Security Engine fault injection detection technology and adds the Intel Converged Security and Management Engine (Intel CSME) fault injection detection technology, which is designed to detect non-invasive physical bug attacks on the pins that supply the clock and voltage. The TRC is also designed to detect electromagnetic fault injections, resulting in a state-of-the-art security layer.

As confirmed by the chip giant, the TRC was initially developed by Intel laboratories to monitor dynamic variations, such as voltage drop, temperature, and circuit aging, all to improve performance and energy efficiency. In this way, as new technologies evolve, so do their applications, and that is where Intel has been able to play its cards, as Carlos Tokunaga, principal engineer at Intel Labs, explains the approach of the research that he carried out. to CRT:

Intel iStare

“By changing the monitoring settings and building the infrastructure to take advantage of the CRT’s sensitivity to fault injection attacks, the circuit was tailored for safety applications.”

The Intel TRC is designed to protect against certain types of physical attacks by monitoring delay of specific types of digital circuits. When calibrated to specific sensor sensitivity expectations, the CRT signals an error when it detects a timing failure due to voltage, clock, temperature, or electromagnetic failure. Since the TRC is calibrated to signal an error at a voltage level beyond the CSME’s rated operating range, any TRC error condition is an indication that the data might be corrupted, triggering mitigation techniques to ensure its integrity. Intel has applied the TRC to the Platform Controller Hub (PCH), a chipset separate and isolated from the CPU that enhances the root of trust protection of a system called Intel CSME.

It is important to keep in mind that the most important aspect to produce this type of hardware sensor is calibration, and that is if the sensor is calibrated too aggressively would detect normal workload voltage dips as false positives. False positives create noise and could lead to platform instability, placing an additional burden on cybersecurity teams who, as we know, already regularly deal with high workloads.

Intel has invested in security capabilities to protect against physical attacks to improve software resiliency, as workloads expand and threat models constantly evolve. Security is a system-level property embedded in the silicon, and all system components, from software to silicon, can help keep data secure. We can find more information on the official Intel website.

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