Jinn: Hijacking Safe Programs with Trojans

Authors: 

Komail Dharsee and John Criswell, University of Rochester

Abstract: 

Untrusted hardware supply chains enable malicious, powerful, and permanent alterations to processors known as hardware trojans. Such hardware trojans can undermine any software-enforced security policies deployed on top of the hardware. Existing defenses target a select set of hardware components, specifically those that implement hardware-enforced security mechanisms such as cryptographic cores, user/kernel privilege isolation, and memory protections.

We observe that computing systems exercise general purpose processor logic to implement software-enforced security policies. This makes general purpose logic security critical since tampering with it could violate software-based security policies. Leveraging this insight, we develop a novel class of hardware trojans, which we dub Jinn trojans, that corrupt general-purpose hardware to enable flexible and powerful high level attacks. Jinn trojans deactivate compiler-based security-enforcement mechanisms, making type-safe software vulnerable to memory-safety attacks. We prototyped design-time Jinn trojans in the gem5 simulator and used them to attack programs written in Rust, inducing memory-safety vulnerabilities to launch control-flow hijacking attacks. We find that Jinn trojans can effectively compromise software-enforced security policies by compromising a single bit of architectural state with as little as 8 bits of persistent trojan-internal state. Thus, we show that Jinn trojans are effective even when planted in general purpose hardware, disjoint from any hardware-enforced security components. We show that protecting hardware-enforced security logic is insufficient to keep a system secure from hardware trojans.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {287149,
author = {Komail Dharsee and John Criswell},
title = {Jinn: Hijacking Safe Programs with Trojans},
booktitle = {32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 23)},
year = {2023},
isbn = {978-1-939133-37-3},
address = {Anaheim, CA},
pages = {6965--6982},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentation/dharsee},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video