iATPG: Instruction-level Automatic Test Program Generation for Vulnerabilities under DVFS attack

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Kuozhong Zhang, Junying Huang, Jing Ye, Xiaochun Ye, Da Wang, Dongrui Fan, Huawei Li, Xiaowei Li, Zhimin Zhang

Published: 2019, Last Modified: 06 Jan 2026IOLTS 2019EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: With the growing cost of powering and cooling, the Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technique has been adopted in many mobiles and embedded devices nowadays. However, attackers are capable of maliciously manipulating the DVFS to threaten application programs including the security related ones. This paper proposes an instruction-level Automatic Test Program Generation (iATPG) framework, which generates test programs to test the vulnerabilities of CPU instructions under the DVFS attack. The conditions that the test program needs to meet, the testability of CPU instructions, and the iATPG algorithm are proposed. It is applied to an arm CPU in a mobile phone. Typical instructions are tested, and some are found vulnerable. The application programs using these instructions are then attacked to prove the effectiveness of the proposed framework.