Hardware Moving Target Defenses against Physical Attacks
David S. Koblah, Fatemeh Ganji, Domenic J. Forte, Shahin Tajik · 2022
The concept of moving target defense (MTD) has entrenched itself as a viable strategy to reverse the typical asymmetries in cyber warfare. MTDs are technologies that seek to make target systems dynamically change in order to limit the time and information available to complete an attack, increase the likelihood of detection, and/or deter attackers from proceeding. The benefits of MTD have been shown for network-, operating system-, and application-level security. Hardware roots-of-trust, however, are static "sitting ducks", especially against physical attacks, and can therefore benefit from the dynamics brought about by MTDs. Although many MTD concepts seem transferable to hardware applications, there has hardly been any work to establish a functioning research pipeline for countermeasures to physical attacks. The aim of this paper is to introduce viable MTD concepts, describe the issues that they can address, and chart a path towards their realization for the community.