Tamper-Resistant Arithmetic for Public-Key Cryptography

Cryptographic hardware has found many uses in many ubiquitous and pervasive security devices with a small form factor, e.g. SIM cards, smart cards, electronic security tokens, and soon even RFIDs. With applications in banking, telecommunication, healthcare, e-commerce and entertainment, these devices use cryptography to provide security services like authentication, identification and confidentiality to the user. However, the widespread adoption of these devices into the mass market, and the lack of a physical security perimeter have increased the risk of theft, reverse engineering, and cloning. Despite the use of strong cryptographic algorithms, these devices often succumb to powerful side-channel attacks. These attacks provide a motivated third party with access to the inner workings of the device and therefore the opportunity to circumvent the protection of the cryptographic envelope. Apart from passive side-channel analysis, which has been the subject of intense research for over a decade, active tampering attacks like fault analysis have recently gained increased attention from the academic and industrial research community. In this dissertation we address the question of how to protect cryptographic devices against this kind of attacks. More specifically, we focus our attention on public key algorithms like elliptic curve cryptography and their underlying arithmetic structure. In our research we address challenges such as the cost of implementation, the level of protection, and the error model in an adversarial situation. The approaches that we investigated all apply concepts from coding theory, in particular the theory of cyclic codes. This seems intuitive, since both public key cryptography and cyclic codes share finite field arithmetic as a common foundation. The major contributions of our research are (a) a generalization of cyclic codes that allow embedding of finite fields into redundant rings under a ring homomorphism, (b) a new family of non-linear arithmetic residue codes with very high error detection probability, (c) a set of new low-cost arithmetic primitives for optimal extension field arithmetic based on robust codes, and (d) design techniques for tamper resilient finite state machines

Integration of optical communications in an underwater docking station

As problems within underwater communication arise, there is a need to transfer data at high rates. For this reason, optical communication is deployed for underwater systems.This thesis proposes an optical communication protocol between an underwater station and an AUV, designed to ensure reliable communication while maintaining high speeds of transmission

Experiments in fault tolerant software reliability

The reliability of voting was evaluated in a fault-tolerant software system for small output spaces. The effectiveness of the back-to-back testing process was investigated. Version 3.0 of the RSDIMU-ATS, a semi-automated test bed for certification testing of RSDIMU software, was prepared and distributed. Software reliability estimation methods based on non-random sampling are being studied. The investigation of existing fault-tolerance models was continued and formulation of new models was initiated

Multipath/modulation study for the tracking and data relay satellite system Final report, 14 Apr. 1969 - 12 Jan. 1970

Multipath modulation study of tracking and data relay satellite syste

Energy-efficient coding for high speed links

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-77).Throughput and energy-efficiency of high-speed chip-to-chip interconnects present critical bottlenecks in a whole range of important applications, from processor-memory interfaces, to network routers. These links currently rely solely on complex equalization techniques to maintain the bit error rate lower than 10-15. While applicable to data rates up to 10 Gb/s on most links, this approach does not scale well to higher data rates or better energy-efficiency. The work described in the thesis shows that it may be possible to use coding techniques to share the burden of combating errors, while increasing the throughput of the link or improving its energy-efficiency. Since codes here attempt to alleviate the impact of partially correlated sources of error (like reflections interference, crosstalk and jitter), an experimental setup was created for characterization of link channel properties and performance gains from different codes. Four codes, specifically Hamming, BCH, Fire, and SEC-DED codes, are implemented and analyzed with various configurations (i.e. different blocksizes, data rates, and detection or correction). Most significantly, it is discovered that detection and retransmission of even the simple codes implemented in this project may be able to maintain a bit error rate of 10-15.by Maxine Lee.M.Eng

Error-Correction Coding and Decoding: Bounds, Codes, Decoders, Analysis and Applications

Coding; Communications; Engineering; Networks; Information Theory; Algorithm