Towards Malicious Exploitation of Energy Management Mechanisms
Résumé
Architectures are becoming more and more complex
to keep up with the increase of algorithmic complexity. To
fully exploit those architectures, dynamic resources managers
are required. The goal of dynamic managers is either to optimize
the resource usage (e.g. cores, memory) or to reduce
energy consumption under performances constraints. However,
performance optimization being their main goal, they are not
developed to be secure and present vulnerabilities. Recently, it
was proven that energy managers can be exploited to cause faults
within a processor and it can be used to steal information from
a user device. However, this exploitation is not often possible
in current commercial devices. In this work, we show current
security vulnerabilities through another type of malicious usage
of energy management, experimentation shows that it is possible
to remotely lock out a device, denying access to all services and
data, requiring for example the user to pay a ransom to unlock
it. The main target of this exploit are embedded systems and we
demonstrate this work by its implementation on two different
commercial ARM based devices.