Stabilizing D Flip-Flop Orbits with Self-Modifiable Differential Equations

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated electronic hardware attacks that sabotage pacemakers and insulin injectors. Injecting clock glitches can skip cryptographic instructions, defeating the security of the executing instructions. Typically, these various hardware attacks destabilize the dynamical behavior of the electronics. For over 70 years, flip-flops have been a fundamental building block of digital computers. For this reason, we focus our attention on a differential equation model of the D flip-flop. Our primary contribution applies self-modifiable differential equations to a D flip-flop model. In particular, meta operators can dynamically self-modify the differential equations of a flip-flop so that a noise attack is healed or ameliorated. Overall, we introduce new mathematical methods of healing a dynamical system that is performing a task.