Engineering Commons^™

Titan: Uncovering The Paradigm Shift In Security Vulnerability At Near-Threshold Computing, Prabal Basu, Pramesh Pandey, Aatreyi Bal, Chidhambaranathan Rajamanikkam, Koushik Chakraborty, Sanghamitra Roy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we investigate the emerging security threats at Near-Threshold Computing (NTC) that are poised to jeopardize the trustworthy operation of future low-power electronic devices. A substantial research effort over the last decade has bolstered energy efficient operation in low-power computing. However, innovation in low-power security has received only marginal attention, thwarting a ubiquitous adoption of critical Internet of Things applications, such as wearable gadgets. Using a cross-layer methodology, we demonstrate that the timing fault vulnerability of a circuit rapidly increases as the operating conditions of the transistor devices shift from super-threshold to near-threshold values. Exploiting this vulnerability, we …