DRsam: Detection of Fault-Based Microarchitectural Side-Channel Attacks in RISC-V Using Statistical Preprocessing and Association Rule Mining

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hassan, Muhammad, Mushtaq, Maria, Raik, Jaan, Ghasempouri, Tara
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917030477692928
author Hassan, Muhammad
Mushtaq, Maria
Raik, Jaan
Ghasempouri, Tara
author_facet Hassan, Muhammad
Mushtaq, Maria
Raik, Jaan
Ghasempouri, Tara
contents RISC-V processors are becoming ubiquitous in critical applications, but their susceptibility to microarchitectural side-channel attacks is a serious concern. Detection of microarchitectural attacks in RISC-V is an emerging research topic that is relatively underexplored, compared to x86 and ARM. The first line of work to detect flush+fault-based microarchitectural attacks in RISC-V leverages Machine Learning (ML) models, yet it leaves several practical aspects that need further investigation. To address overlooked issues, we leveraged gem5 and propose a new detection method combining statistical preprocessing and association rule mining having reconfiguration capabilities to generalize the detection method for any microarchitectural attack. The performance comparison with state-of-the-art reveals that the proposed detection method achieves up to 5.15% increase in accuracy, 7% rise in precision, and 3.91% improvement in recall under the cryptographic, computational, and memory-intensive workloads alongside its flexibility to detect new variant of flush+fault attack. Moreover, as the attack detection relies on association rules, their human-interpretable nature provides deep insight to understand microarchitectural behavior during the execution of attack and benign applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18612
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DRsam: Detection of Fault-Based Microarchitectural Side-Channel Attacks in RISC-V Using Statistical Preprocessing and Association Rule Mining
Hassan, Muhammad
Mushtaq, Maria
Raik, Jaan
Ghasempouri, Tara
Cryptography and Security
Hardware Architecture
RISC-V processors are becoming ubiquitous in critical applications, but their susceptibility to microarchitectural side-channel attacks is a serious concern. Detection of microarchitectural attacks in RISC-V is an emerging research topic that is relatively underexplored, compared to x86 and ARM. The first line of work to detect flush+fault-based microarchitectural attacks in RISC-V leverages Machine Learning (ML) models, yet it leaves several practical aspects that need further investigation. To address overlooked issues, we leveraged gem5 and propose a new detection method combining statistical preprocessing and association rule mining having reconfiguration capabilities to generalize the detection method for any microarchitectural attack. The performance comparison with state-of-the-art reveals that the proposed detection method achieves up to 5.15% increase in accuracy, 7% rise in precision, and 3.91% improvement in recall under the cryptographic, computational, and memory-intensive workloads alongside its flexibility to detect new variant of flush+fault attack. Moreover, as the attack detection relies on association rules, their human-interpretable nature provides deep insight to understand microarchitectural behavior during the execution of attack and benign applications.
title DRsam: Detection of Fault-Based Microarchitectural Side-Channel Attacks in RISC-V Using Statistical Preprocessing and Association Rule Mining
topic Cryptography and Security
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18612