Work-in-Progress: Boot Sequence Integrity Verification with Power Analysis

Abstract

The current security mechanisms for embedded systems often rely on Intrusion Detection System (IDS) running on the system itself. This provides the detector with relevant internal resources but also exposes it to being bypassed by an attacker. If the host is compromised, its IDS can not be trusted anymore and becomes useless. Power consumption offers an accurate and trusted representation of the system’s state that can be leveraged to verify its integrity during the boot sequence. We present a novel IDS that uses the side-channel power consumption of a target device to protect it against various firmware and hardware attacks. The proposed Boot Process Verifier (BPV) uses a combination of rule-based and machine-learning-based side-channel analysis to monitor and evaluate the integrity of different networking equipment with an overall accuracy of 0,942. The BPV is part of a new layer of cybersecurity mechanisms that leverage the physical emissions of devices for protection.