Search Results (7)

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought about the processing and storage of sensitive information on resource-constrained devices, which are susceptible to various hardware attacks. Fault injection attacks (FIAs) stand out as one of the most widespread. Particularly, voltage-based FIAs (V-FIAs) have gained popularity due to their non-invasive nature and high effectiveness in inducing faults by pushing the IoT hardware to its operational limits. Improving the security of devices and gaining a comprehensive understanding of their vulnerabilities is of utmost importance. In this study, we present a novel fault injection method and employ it to target an 8-bit AVR microcontroller. We identify the optimal attack parameters by analyzing the detected failures and their trends. A case study is conducted to validate the efficacy of this new method in a more realistic scenario, focusing on a simple authentication method using the determined optimal parameters. This analysis not only demonstrates the feasibility of the V-FIA but also elucidates the primary characteristics of the resulting failures and their propagation in resource-constrained devices. Additionally, we devise a hardware/software countermeasure that can be integrated into any resource-constrained device to thwart such attacks in IoT scenarios. Full article

Locating the fault position is a crucial part of the failure mechanism analysis of integrated circuits. This paper proposes a hard defect locating system based on Thermal Laser Stimulation (TLS) technology. The equation for laser-induced changes in the electrical parameters of semiconductor devices is a good guide to the hardware and software design of the hard defect locating system. The scanning mode of fast total scanning combined with slow point-to-point scanning can quickly locate abnormal areas. A modified median absolute difference (MAD) method is applied to the extraction of anomalous data. The system software can automatically and collaboratively control the 3D mobile station, laser, and signal acquisition unit. It also can intuitively display the distribution of abnormal points on the infrared image. Using a failure MRAM chip and a good one to conduct a comparative test, the abnormal points distributed on the infrared image of the chip indicate that the failure area is in the digital module or eFuse module of the chip, and the Emission Microscopy (EMMI) experiment also verifies the accuracy of the test system. Full article

Global warming is one of the most compelling environmental threats today, as the rise in energy consumption and CO₂ emission caused a dreadful impact on our environment. The data centers, computing devices, network equipment, etc., consume vast amounts of energy that the thermal power plants mainly generate. Primarily fossil fuels like coal and oils are used for energy generation in these power plants that induce various environmental problems such as global warming ozone layer depletion, which can even become the cause of premature deaths of living beings. The recent research trend has shifted towards optimizing energy consumption and green fields since the world recognized the importance of these concepts. This paper aims to conduct a complete systematic mapping analysis on the impact of high energy consumption in cloud data centers and its effect on the environment. To answer the research questions identified in this paper, one hundred nineteen primary studies published until February 2022 were considered and further categorized. Some new developments in green cloud computing and the taxonomy of various energy efficiency techniques used in data centers have also been discussed. It includes techniques like VM Virtualization and Consolidation, Power-aware, Bio-inspired methods, Thermal-management techniques, and an effort to evaluate the cloud data center’s role in reducing energy consumption and CO₂ footprints. Most of the researchers proposed software level techniques as with these techniques, massive infrastructures are not required as compared with hardware techniques, and it is less prone to failure and faults. Also, we disclose some dominant problems and provide suggestions for future enhancements in green computing. Full article

In wireless sensor networks, the quality of the provided data is influenced by the properties of the sensor nodes. Often deployed in large numbers, they usually consist of low-cost components where failures are the norm, even more so in harsh outdoor environments. Current fault detection techniques, however, consider the sensor data alone and neglect vital information from the nodes’ hard- and software. As a consequence, they can not distinguish between rare data anomalies caused by proper events in the sensed data on one side and fault-induced data distortion on the other side. In this paper, we contribute with a novel, open-source sensor node platform for monitoring applications such as environmental monitoring. For long battery life, it comprises mainly low-power components. In contrast to other sensor nodes, our platform provides self-diagnostic measures to enable active node-level reliability. The entire sensor node platform including the hardware and software components has been implemented and is publicly available and free to use for everyone. Based on an extensive and long-running practical experiment setup, we show that the detectability of node faults is improved and the distinction between rare but proper events and fault-induced data distortion is indeed possible. We also show that these measures have a negligible overhead on the node’s energy efficiency and hardware costs. This improves the overall reliability of wireless sensor networks with both, long battery life and high-quality data. Full article

In the past few decades, a great number of hardware and software reliability models have been proposed to address hardware failures in hardware subsystems and software failures in software subsystems, respectively. The interactions between hardware and software subsystems are often neglected in order to simplify reliability modeling, and hence, most existing reliability models assumed hardware subsystems and software subsystem are independent of each other. However, this may not be true in reality. In this study, system failures are classified into three categories, which are hardware failures, software failures, and hardware-software interaction failures. The main contribution of our research is that we further classify hardware-software interaction failures into two groups: software-induced hardware failures and hardware-induced software failures. A Markov-based unified system reliability modeling incorporating all three categories of system failures is developed in this research, which provides a novel and practical perspective to define system failures and further improve reliability prediction accuracy. Comparison of system reliability estimation between the reliability models with and without considering hardware-software interactions is elucidated in the numerical example. The impacts on system reliability prediction as the changes of transition parameters are also illustrated by the numerical examples. Full article

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to faults because of their deployment in unpredictable and hazardous environments. This makes WSN prone to failures such as software, hardware, and communication failures. Due to the sensor’s limited resources and diverse deployment fields, fault detection in WSNs has become a daunting task. To solve this problem, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) classifiers are used for classification of gain, offset, spike, data loss, out of bounds, and stuck-at faults at the sensor level. Out of six faults, two of them are induced in the datasets, i.e., spike and data loss faults. The results are compared on the basis of their Detection Accuracy (DA), True Positive Rate (TPR), Matthews Correlation Coefficients (MCC), and F1-score. In this paper, a comparative analysis is performed among the classifiers mentioned previously on real-world datasets. Simulations show that the RF algorithm secures a better fault detection rate than the rest of the classifiers. Full article

Decision fusion is used to fuse classification results and improve the classification accuracy in order to reduce the consumption of energy and bandwidth demand for data transmission. The decentralized classification fusion problem was the reason to use the belief function-based decision fusion approach in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). With the consideration of improving the belief function fusion approach, we have proposed four classification techniques, namely Enhanced K-Nearest Neighbor (EKNN), Enhanced Extreme Learning Machine (EELM), Enhanced Support Vector Machine (ESVM), and Enhanced Recurrent Extreme Learning Machine (ERELM). In addition, WSNs are prone to errors and faults because of their different software, hardware failures, and their deployment in diverse fields. Because of these challenges, efficient fault detection methods must be used to detect faults in a WSN in a timely manner. We have induced four types of faults: offset fault, gain fault, stuck-at fault, and out of bounds fault, and used enhanced classification methods to solve the sensor failure issues. Experimental results show that ERELM gave the first best result for the improvement of the belief function fusion approach. The other three proposed techniques ESVM, EELM, and EKNN provided the second, third, and fourth best results, respectively. The proposed enhanced classifiers are used for fault detection and are evaluated using three performance metrics, i.e., Detection Accuracy (DA), True Positive Rate (TPR), and Error Rate (ER). Simulations show that the proposed methods outperform the existing techniques and give better results for the belief function and fault detection in WSNs. Full article