Potential thermal security risks

Hardware and software techniques for controlling a microprocessor's power and cooling have the undesirable side effect of creating a security risk. They allow a malicious program to control the chip's operating temperature and potentially cause denial of service or even permanent damage. The paper provides an overview of the various vulnerabilities, their costs, and offers preliminary suggestions on how to reduce these risks.

[1]  Ali Keshavarzi,et al.  Thermal Management of High Performance Microprocessors , 2003 .

[2]  Margaret Martonosi,et al.  Dynamic thermal management for high-performance microprocessors , 2001, Proceedings HPCA Seventh International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture.

[3]  Kevin Skadron,et al.  Temperature-aware microarchitecture , 2003, ISCA '03.

[4]  Stephen H. Gunther,et al.  Managing the Impact of Increasing Microprocessor Power Consumption , 2001 .

[5]  D. B. Davis,et al.  Intel Corp. , 1993 .

[6]  Andrew Grover,et al.  Modern System Power Management , 2003, ACM Queue.

[7]  Daniel Pierre Bovet,et al.  Understanding the Linux Kernel , 2000 .

[8]  Margaret Martonosi,et al.  Temperature-Aware Design Issues for SMT and CMP Architectures , 2004 .

[9]  Carla E. Brodley,et al.  Heat stroke: power-density-based denial of service in SMT , 2005, 11th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture.

[10]  Sarita V. Adve,et al.  Predictive dynamic thermal management for multimedia applications , 2003, ICS '03.