Joonho Kong, Johnsy John, Eui-Young Chung, Sung Woo Chung, and Jie Hu, "On the Thermal Attack in Instruction Caches", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing , vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 217-223, April-June 2010.
Abstract
The instruction cache has been recognized as one of the least hot units
in microprocessors, which leaves the instruction cache largely ignored
in on-chip thermal management. Consequently, thermal sensors are not
allocated near the instruction cache. However, malicious codes can
exploit the deficiency in this empirical design and heat up fine-grain
localized hotspots in the instruction cache, which might lead to
physical damages. In this paper, we show how instruction caches can be
thermally attacked by malicious codes and how simple techniques can be
utilized to protect instruction caches from the thermal attack.