A study of MCU-level attacks and defences on power distribution fusion terminals

The ubiquitous power Internet of Things (IoT) requires the power system to be transformed from the original centralized monitoring mode to a distributed and IoT-based ubiquitous mode. A high-security, high-performance Micro Controller Unit (MCU) is required as a fundamental support for power distribution IoTs terminals. Nowadays, the RISC-V instruction set has a particularly promising future in Power Distribution Fusion Terminals (PDFT) due to its advantages of simplicity, open source, and support for custom extensions. This paper proves the security threat of Spectre attacks to the MCU in power distribution fusion terminals, provides future countermeasures and directions for how to improve the safety of power-specific chips using RISC-V instruction sets. This research adopts software simulation method combined with FPGA prototype verification, which we believe can provide a novel solution of MCU architecture design for power distribution terminal applications.