High Bandwidth Thermal Covert Channel in 3-D-Integrated Multicore Processors

Exploiting thermal coupling among the cores of a processor to secretly communicate sensitive information is a serious threat in mobile, desktop, and server platforms. Existing works on temperature-based covert communication typically rely on controlling the execution of high-power CPU stressing programs to transmit confidential information. Such covert channels with high-power programs are typically easier to detect as they cause significant rise in temperature. In this work, we demonstrate that by leveraging vertical integration, it is sufficient to execute typical SPLASH-2 benchmark applications to transfer 200 bits per second (bps) of secret data via thermal covert channels. The strong vertical thermal coupling among the cores of a 3-D multicore processor increases the rates of covert communication by 3.4× compared to covert communication in conventional 2-D integrated circuits (ICs). Furthermore, we show that the bandwidth of this thermal communication in 3-D ICs is more resilient to thermal interference caused by applications running in other cores. This reduced interference significantly increases the danger posed by such attacks. We also investigate the effect of reducing intertier overlap between colluded cores and show that the covert channel bandwidth is reduced by up to 62% with no overlap.