Abstract
Direct Memory Access (DMA) is a state-of-the-art technique to optimize the speed of memory access and to efficiently use processing power during data transfers between the main system and a peripheral device. However, this advanced feature opens security vulnerabilities of access compromise and to manipulate the main memory of the victim host machine. The paper outlines a lightweight process that creates resilience against DMA attacks minimal modification to the configuration of the DMA protocol. The proposed scheme performs device identification of the trusted PCIe devices that have DMA capabilities and constructs a database of profiling time to authenticate the trusted devices before they can access the system. The results show that the proposed scheme generates a unique identifier for trusted devices and authenticates the devices. Furthermore, a machine learning–based real-time authentication scheme is proposed that enables runtime authentication and share the results of the time required for training and respective accuracy.
Highlights
Direct Memory Access (DMA) is a state-of-the-art technique to optimize the speed of memory access and to efficiently use processing power during data transfers between the main system and a peripheral device
We propose a lightweight authentication scheme for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) devices based on device profiling
When the Memory Read Request (MRd) Transaction Layer Packets (TLPs) arrives at the PCIe root complex, the victim machine fulfills the request and sends a completion TLP containing data from the host machine to the PCIe device, which sends the data to the attacker
Summary
Traditional systems heavily rely on the CPU and utilizes several cycles for data transfers between peripheral devices and the main memory. A way to get around this performance overhead is to use DMA, which allows the peripheral hardware to bypass the CPU and directly send and receive data from the memory as well as read and write from the memory. DMA allows the interactions between external devices and memory independent of the CPU; the load of CPU is reduced, and this improves the overall performance of the system. During the initialization of the DMA controller, the memory controller provides memory addresses and initiates memory read or write cycles for data transfer and sends an interrupt to the CPU when the whole process of data transmission is done
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