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Voltage Overscaling Techniques for Security Applications

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Abstract

Voltage overscaling (VOS) has emerged as a promising solution for ultra-low-power approximate computation. However, aggressive scaling of the operating voltage can create faults and introduce analog fingerprints of the circuit components. For example, VOS has been utilized as a fault-inducing technique in attacks such as CLKscrew, where voltage regulators in the SoC processors are exploited to create errors in cryptographic computation. On the other hand, errors due to aggressive VOS on sub-45 nm technology nodes can reveal a significant amount of information about the underlying hardware’s physical variations. Hence, in this chapter, we detail the current status of research and development for VOS in security applications, from authenticating devices to securing machine learning models in the main memory. Our goal is to demonstrate the security promises and pitfalls of VOS to the engineers building the next generation of low-power voltage-overscaled systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Md Tanvir Arafin

  2. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Qian Xu & Gang Qu

Authors
  1. Md Tanvir Arafin
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  2. Qian Xu
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  3. Gang Qu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gang Qu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

    Weiqiang Liu

  2. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Fabrizio Lombardi

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Arafin, M.T., Xu, Q., Qu, G. (2022). Voltage Overscaling Techniques for Security Applications. In: Liu, W., Lombardi, F. (eds) Approximate Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98347-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98347-5_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-98346-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-98347-5

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