ElectroMagnetic Analysis and Fault Injection onto Secure Circuits

International audienceImplementation attacks are a major threat to hardware cryptographic implementations. These attacks exploit the correlation existing between the computed data and variables such as computation time, consumed power, and electromagnetic (EM) emissions. Recently, the EM channel has been proven as an effective passive and active attack technique against secure implementations. In this paper, we review the recent results obtained on this subject, with a particular focus on EM as a fault injection tool

Physical Fault Injection and Side-Channel Attacks on Mobile Devices:A Comprehensive Analysis

Today's mobile devices contain densely packaged system-on-chips (SoCs) with multi-core, high-frequency CPUs and complex pipelines. In parallel, sophisticated SoC-assisted security mechanisms have become commonplace for protecting device data, such as trusted execution environments, full-disk and file-based encryption. Both advancements have dramatically complicated the use of conventional physical attacks, requiring the development of specialised attacks. In this survey, we consolidate recent developments in physical fault injections and side-channel attacks on modern mobile devices. In total, we comprehensively survey over 50 fault injection and side-channel attack papers published between 2009-2021. We evaluate the prevailing methods, compare existing attacks using a common set of criteria, identify several challenges and shortcomings, and suggest future directions of research

Toward Reliable, Secure, and Energy-Efficient Multi-Core System Design

Computer hardware researchers have perennially focussed on improving the performance of computers while stipulating the energy consumption under a strict budget. While several innovations over the years have led to high performance and energy efficient computers, more challenges have also emerged as a fallout. For example, smaller transistor devices in modern multi-core systems are afflicted with several reliability and security concerns, which were inconceivable even a decade ago. Tackling these bottlenecks happens to negatively impact the power and performance of the computers. This dissertation explores novel techniques to gracefully solve some of the pressing challenges of the modern computer design. Specifically, the proposed techniques improve the reliability of on-chip communication fabric under a high power supply noise, increase the energy-efficiency of low-power graphics processing units, and demonstrate an unprecedented security loophole of the low-power computing paradigm through rigorous hardware-based experiments

Internet-of-Things (IoT) Security Threats: Attacks on Communication Interface

Internet of Things (IoT) devices collect and process information from remote places and have significantly increased the productivity of distributed systems or individuals. Due to the limited budget on power consumption, IoT devices typically do not include security features such as advanced data encryption and device authentication. In general, the hardware components deployed in IoT devices are not from high end markets. As a result, the integrity and security assurance of most IoT devices are questionable. For example, adversary can implement a Hardware Trojan (HT) in the fabrication process for the IoT hardware devices to cause information leak or malfunctions. In this work, we investigate the security threats on IoT with a special emphasis on the attacks that aim for compromising the communication interface between IoT devices and their main processing host. First, we analyze the security threats on low-energy smart light bulbs, and then we exploit the limitation of Bluetooth protocols to monitor the unencrypted data packet from the air-gapped network. Second, we examine the security vulnerabilities of single-wire serial communication protocol used in data exchange between a sensor and a microcontroller. Third, we implement a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack on a master-slave communication protocol adopted in Inter-integrated Circuit (I2C) interface. Our MITM attack is executed by an analog hardware Trojan, which crosses the boundary between digital and analog worlds. Furthermore, an obfuscated Trojan detection method(ADobf) is proposed to monitor the abnormal behaviors induced by analog Trojans on the I2C interface

Smart card security

Smart Card devices are commonly used on many secure applications where there is a need to identify the card holder in order to provide a personalised service. The value of access to locked data and services makes Smart Cards a desirable attack target for hackers of all sorts. The range of attacks a Smart Card and its environment can be subjected to ranges from social engineering to exploiting hardware and software bugs and features. This research has focused on several hardware related attacks and potential threats. Namely, power glitch attack, power analysis, laser attack, the potential effect on security of memory power consumption reduction techniques and using a re-configurable instruction set as method to harden opcode interpretation. A semi-automated simulation environment to test designs against glitch attacks and power analysis has been developed. This simulation environment can be easily integrated within Atmel’s design flow to bring assurance of their designs’ behaviour and permeability to such attacks at an early development stage. Previous power analysis simulation work focused on testing the implementation of part of the cryptographic algorithm. This work focuses on targeting the whole algorithm, allowing the test of a wider range of countermeasures. A common glitch detection approach is monitoring the power supply for abnormal voltage values and fluctuations. This approach can fail to detect some fast glitches. The alternative approach used in this research monitors the effects of a glitch on a mono-stable circuit sensitive to fault injection by glitch attacks. This work has resulted in a patented glitch detector that improves the overall glitch detection range. The use of radiation countermeasures as laser countermeasures and potential sensors has been investigated too. Radiation and laser attacks have similar effects on silicon devices. Whilst several countermeasures against radiation have been developed over the years, almost no explicit mention of laser countermeasures was found. This research has demonstrated the suitability of using some radiation countermeasures as laser countermeasures. Memory partitioning is a static and dynamic power consumption reduction technique successfully used in various devices. The nature of Smart Card devices restricts the applicability of some aspects of this power reduction technique. This research line has resulted in the proposal of a memory partitioning approach suitable to Smart Cards