Clock glitching attack on RISC-V: how-to, results & impact on the automotive industry. 👨🏽‍🏭📟🕓⚡🥳

Security researcher Remco van Dijk, in his thesis, investigates how fault injection (FI) attacks - specifically clock glitching - can compromise Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) on RISC-V processors.

The author simulated clock glitch attacks on two RISC-V cores:

1️⃣ SiFive E31 (a commercial embedded core)

2️⃣ lowRISC Ibex (an open-source FPGA-based core)

The results - well, you can probably guess: RISC-V TEEs are only as secure as the hardware they run on. And it will cost about $300 to build a lab to break them.

It’s disturbing because RISC-V is very popular in industries like automotive, critical infrastructure, and medical equipment - mainly because it’s cheaper to build with (no licensing fees like with ARM).

Enjoy the thesis, and please share it with your colleagues who work in the relevant industries.

More details:

Fault Injection Attacks on Trusted Execution for RISC-V Cores [PDF]: https://essay.utwente.nl/fileshare/file/104771/van%20Dijk_MA_EEMCS.pdf