Defending Against EMI Attacks on Just-In-Time Checkpoint for Resilient Intermittent Systems

Energy harvesting systems have emerged as an alternative to battery-powered IoT devices. The systems utilize a just-in-time checkpoint protocol that stores volatile states when a power outage occurs, ensuring crash consistency. However, this paper uncovers a new security vulnerability in the checkpoint protocol, revealing its susceptibility to electromagnetic interference (EMI). If exploited, adversaries could cause denial of service or data corruption in victim devices. To defeat EMI attacks, this paper introduces GECKO, a compiler-directed countermeasure that operates on commodity platforms used in energy harvesting systems without requiring hardware support. Our experiments on real boards demonstrate that GECKO defeats the EMI attack with a trivial performance overhead by 6% on average.