Sequential Circuit Design for Embedded Cryptographic Applications Resilient to Adversarial Faults

In the relatively young field of fault-tolerant cryptography, the main research effort has focused exclusively on the protection of the data path of cryptographic circuits. To date, however, we have not found any work that aims at protecting the control logic of these circuits against fault attacks, which thus remains the proverbial Achilles’ heel. Motivated by a hypothetical yet realistic fault analysis attack that, in principle, could be mounted against any modular exponentiation engine, even one with appropriate data path protection, we set out to close this remaining gap. In this paper, we present guidelines for the design of multifault-resilient sequential control logic based on standard Error-Detecting Codes (EDCs) with large minimum distance. We introduce a metric that measures the effectiveness of the error detection technique in terms of the effort the attacker has to make in relation to the area overhead spent in implementing the EDC. Our comparison shows that the proposed EDC-based technique provides superior performance when compared against regular N-modular redundancy techniques. Furthermore, our technique scales well and does not affect the critical path delay

Quantum Dimension Polynomials: A Networked-Numbers Game Approach

The Networked-Numbers Game--a mathematical game\u27\u27 played on a simple graph--is incredibly accessible and yet surprisingly rich in content. The Game is known to contain deep connections to the finite-dimensional simple Lie algebras over the complex numbers. On the other hand, Quantum Dimension Polynomials (QDPs)--enumerative expressions traditionally understood through root systems--corresponding to the above Lie algebras are complicated to derive and often inaccessible to undergraduates. In this thesis, the Networked-Numbers Game is defined and some known properties are presented. Next, the significance of the QDPs as a method to count combinatorially interesting structures is relayed. Ultimately, a novel closed-form expression of the type D_n QDPs and novel derivations of the QDPs of types A_n, B_n, C_n, and D_n are provided using an inductive proof through the Networked-Numbers Game. This provides a combinatorial avenue of approach to a topic traditionally only attainable through Lie theory

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

Alcohol Bottles at Fort Snelling: A Study of American Military Culture in the 19th Century

The goal of this research was to explore the theme of alcohol as a social status marker within the realm of the American military frontier in the early to mid-1800s. The study was done as a comparison between the drinking habits of the officers and the enlisted men throughout the occupancy of the selected fort during the 1800s. While glass bottles and alcohol are both extensively studied subjects in anthropology and archaeology, there is a gap in the shape of alcohol’s use as a social status marker within the American military. This thesis hopes to start to fill in that gap. The fort studied was Fort Snelling, a 19th century era military installation in St. Paul, Minnesota. The fort had been previously excavated and its collection curated, but very little research has been done on its contents. The chosen artifacts for this study were the remains of alcohol bottles, including bottle styles that had multiple uses so long as alcohol were among them. The study revealed variations in choice of drink between officers and enlisted men

Versatile Montgomery Multiplier Architectures

Several algorithms for Public Key Cryptography (PKC), such as RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography, require modular multiplication of very large operands (sizes from 160 to 4096 bits) as their core arithmetic operation. To perform this operation reasonably fast, general purpose processors are not always the best choice. This is why specialized hardware, in the form of cryptographic co-processors, become more attractive. Based upon the analysis of recent publications on hardware design for modular multiplication, this M.S. thesis presents a new architecture that is scalable with respect to word size and pipelining depth. To our knowledge, this is the first time a word based algorithm for Montgomery\u27s method is realized using high-radix bit-parallel multipliers working with two different types of finite fields (unified architecture for GF(p) and GF(2n)). Previous approaches have relied mostly on bit serial multiplication in combination with massive pipelining, or Radix-8 multiplication with the limitation to a single type of finite field. Our approach is centered around the notion that the optimal delay in bit-parallel multipliers grows with logarithmic complexity with respect to the operand size n, O(log3/2 n), while the delay of bit serial implementations grows with linear complexity O(n). Our design has been implemented in VHDL, simulated and synthesized in 0.5μ CMOS technology. The synthesized net list has been verified in back-annotated timing simulations and analyzed in terms of performance and area consumption

Broadband adiabatic conversion of light polarization

A broadband technique for robust adiabatic rotation and conversion of light polarization is proposed. It uses the analogy between the equation describing the polarization state of light propagating through an optically anisotropic medium and the Schrodinger equation describing coherent laser excitation of a three-state atom. The proposed techniques is analogous to the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) technique in quantum optics; it is applicable to a wide range of frequencies and it is robust to variations in the ropagation length

EQUINE PROTOZOAL MYELOENCEPHALITIS: INVESTIGATION OF GENETIC SUSCEPTIBILITY AND ASSESSMENT OF AN EQUINE INFECTION METHOD

Equine protozoal myeloencephalitis (EPM) is a progressive neurological disease of horses caused by Sarcocystis neurona. Two projects were conducted to identify factors involved in the development of EPM. The first study explored a possible genetic susceptibility to EPM by attempting a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue from 24 definitively-positive EPM horses. DNA extracted from tissues older than 14 months was inadequate for SNP analysis on the Illumina Equine SNP50 BeadChip probably due to degradation and formalin cross-linking. Results were inconclusive as analysis was not possible with the small sample set. The second study evaluated an artificial infection method in creating a reliable equine EPM model. Five horses were injected intravenously at 4 time points with autologous blood incubated with 1,000,000S. neurona merozoites. Challenged horses progressively developed mild to moderate clinical signs and had detectable S. neurona serum antibodies on day 42 post challenge. Horses appeared to have produced a Th1 immune response and cleared the infection by the conclusion of the study on day 89. No histopathological evidence of S. neurona infection was found within central nervous system tissue. This artificial infection method was not effective in replicating the severe clinical EPM seen in natural infections