SoK: SCA-secure ECC in software – mission impossible?

This paper describes an ECC implementation computing the X25519 keyexchange protocol on the Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller. For providing protections against various side-channel and fault attacks we first review known attacks and countermeasures, then we provide software implementations that come with extensive mitigations, and finally we present a preliminary side-channel evaluation. To our best knowledge, this is the first public software claiming affordable protection against multiple classes of attacks that are motivated by distinct real-world application scenarios. We distinguish between X25519 with ephemeral keys and X25519 with static keys and show that the overhead to our baseline unprotected implementation is about 37% and 243%, respectively. While this might seem to be a high price to pay for security, we also show that even our (most protected) static implementation is at least as efficient as widely-deployed ECC cryptographic libraries, which offer much less protection

Combined Fault Injection and Real-Time Side-Channel Analysis for Android Secure-Boot Bypassing

The Secure-Boot is a critical security feature in modern devices based on System-on-Chips (SoC). It ensures the authenticity and integrity of the code before its execution, avoiding the SoC to run malicious code. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first bypass of an Android Secure-Boot by using an Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI). Two hardware characterization methods are combined to conduct this experiment. A real-time Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) is used to synchronize an EMFI during the Linux Kernel authentication step of the Android Secure-Boot of a smartphone-grade SoC. This new synchronization method is called Synchronization by Frequency Detection (SFD). It is based on the detection of the activation of a characteristic frequency in the target electromagnetic emanations. In this work we present a proof-of-concept of this new triggering method. By triggering the attack upon the activation of this characteristic frequency, we successfully bypassed this security feature, effectively running Android OS with a compromised Linux Kernel with one success every 15 minutes

Side-channel Analysis of Subscriber Identity Modules

Subscriber identity modules (SIMs) contain useful forensic data but are often locked with a PIN code that restricts access to this data. If an invalid PIN is entered several times, the card locks and may even destroy its stored data. This presents a challenge to the retrieval of data from the SIM when the PIN is unknown. The field of side-channel analysis (SCA) collects, identifies, and processes information leaked via inadvertent channels. One promising side-channel leakage is that of electromagnetic (EM) emanations; by monitoring the SIM\u27s emissions, it may be possible to determine the correct PIN to unlock the card. This thesis uses EM SCA techniques to attempt to discover the SIM card\u27s PIN. The tested SIM is subjected to simple and differential electromagnetic analysis. No clear data dependency or correlation is apparent. The SIM does reveal information pertaining to its validation routine, but the value of the card\u27s stored PIN does not appear to leak via EM emissions. Two factors contributing to this result are the black-box nature of PIN validation and the hardware and software SCA countermeasures. Further experimentation on SIMs with known operational characteristics is recommended to determine the viability of future SCA attacks on these devices

Security assessment for automotive controllers using side channel and fault injection attacks

Embedded security is nowadays a hot topic. With the arrival of Internet of Things and the increasing presence of embedded electronics in automotive systems, security has become an important factor in product design. This work is aimed to test the security capabilities of automotive electronic devices, using physical attacks such as fault injection and other side-channel techniques. Modern integrated circuits implement countermeasures to such attacks, but it has been proven that those countermeasures were designed with safety in mind, as automotive applications usually requiEmbedded security is nowadays a hot topic. With the arrival of Internet of Things and the increasing demand of connectivity for embedded systems in many industrial markets, including automotive systems, security has become an important factor in product design. This thesis is aimed to test the security capabilities of automotive electronic devices, using physical attacks known as fault injection. Although other industries have been using countermeasures against physical attacks for decades, these are rarely used in automotive embedded systems. Automotive industry efforts have been focused in improving safety and reliability (e.g. ISO 26262 ASIL certification) instead of security. Previous research proved the risk of fault injection attacks on automotive SoCs, but these works were limited to small testing applications running on evaluation boards and not real automotive systems. The current work aims to assess the security of off-the-shelf automotive systems running real applications. More specifically, fault injection attacks are used to bypass the authentication mechanism of the Unified Diagnostic System (ISO 14229) present in two different commercial car dashboards. The findings are exposed in order to suggest design improvements and recommendations for a more secure automotive embedded systems and SoCs

High Speed Clock Glitching

In recent times, hardware security has drawn a lot of interest in the research community. With physical proximity to the target devices, various fault injection hardware attack methods have been proposed and tested to alter their functionality and trigger behavior not intended by the design. There are various types of faults that can be injected depending on the parameters being used and the level at which the device is tampered with. The literature describes various fault models to inject faults in clock of the target but there are no publications on overclocking circuits for fault injection. The proposed method bridges this gap by conducting high-speed clock fault injection on latest high-speed micro-controller units where the target device is overclocked for a short duration in the range of 4-1000 ns. This thesis proposes a method of generating a high-speed clock and driving the target device using the same clock. The properties of the target devices for performing experiments in this research are: Externally accessible clock input line and GPIO line. The proposed method is to develop a high-speed clock using custom bit-stream sent to FPGA and subsequently using external analog circuitry to generate a clock-glitch which can inject fault on the target micro-controller. Communication coupled with glitching allows us to check the target\u27s response, which can result in information disclosure.This is a form of non-invasive and effective hardware attack. The required background, methodology and experimental setup required to implement high-speed clock glitching has been discussed in this thesis. The impact of different overclock frequencies used in clock fault injection is explored. The preliminary results have been discussed and we show that even high-speed micro-controller units should consider countermeasures against clock fault injection. Influencing the execution of Tiva C Launchpad and STM32F4 micro-controller units has been shown in this thesis. The thesis details the method used for the testing a