Internal State Monitoring in RISC-V Microarchitectures for Security Purpose

Embedded systems play a significant role in our everyday lives, making them prime targets for malicious actors. Consequently, ensuring the security of such systems becomes a crucial concern. Among various threats, fault injection attacks on microprocessors are particularly notable. Understanding the effects of these attacks within the microarchitecture is thus essential to assess their impact on overall security.In this paper, we present the Internal State Monitor (ISM), which provides observability at the software level of selected micro-architectural signals in RISC-V processors. ISM will be used at first to better understand the fault effects and their propagation patterns. This understanding is pivotal in designing effective countermeasures to protect processors against these attacks.