Defending Against EMI Attacks on Just-In-Time Checkpoint for Resilient Intermittent Systems

Research Areas: Cyber-Physical Systems

Principal Investigator: Changhee Jung

Energy harvesting systems have emerged as an
alternative to battery-powered IoT devices. The systems utilize a
just-in-time checkpoint protocol that stores volatile states when a
power outage occurs, ensuring crash consistency. However, this
paper uncovers a new security vulnerability in the checkpoint
protocol, revealing its susceptibility to electromagnetic interference (EMI). If exploited, adversaries could cause denial of service
or data corruption in victim devices. To defeat EMI attacks, this
paper introduces GECKO, a compiler-directed countermeasure
that operates on commodity platforms used in energy harvesting
systems without requiring hardware support. Our experiments
on real boards demonstrate that GECKO defeats the EMI attack
with a trivial performance overhead by 6% on average.

Representative Publications

Jaeseok Choi, Hyunwoo Joe, Changhee Jung, and Jongouk Choi, "Defending Against EMI Attacks on Just-In-Time Checkpoint for Resilient Intermittent Systems", IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) 2024