Ing. Vojtěch Miškovský, Ph.D.

Article

10.3390/s22218096

Department of Digital Design

Side-channel analysis has become a widely recognized threat to the security of cryptographic implementations. Different side-channel attacks, as well as countermeasures, have been proposed in the literature. Such attacks pose a severe threat to both hardware and software cryptographic implementations, especially in the IoT environment where the attacker may easily gain physical access to a device, leaving it vulnerable to tampering. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey regarding the non-invasive passive side-channel analysis. We describe both non-profiled and profiled attacks, related security metrics, countermeasures against such attacks, and leakage-assessment methodologies, as available in the literature of more than twenty years of research.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/MECO55406.2022.9797142

Department of Digital Design

Side-channel attacks pose a severe threat to crypto graphic implementations, allowing the attacker to recover secret information based on physical observations of the cryptographic device. Correlation Power Analysis is considered to be one of the most powerful attacks in the non-profiled scenario. In this paper, we consider the distance/Brownian correlation instead of the traditionally used Pearson coefficient. We give a fair comparison of our novel approach attacking AES on three different FPGA platforms and we discuss the distance correlation potential in the context of side-channel analysis.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/DDECS54261.2022.9770139

Department of Digital Design

SipHash is ARX-based pseudorandom function optimized for short inputs. It was developed as a hash table lookup function, but it is also used for MAC generation. At the time of writing, there was no side-channel attack on SipHash known to us. This work is about application of CPA attack on SipHash. Attack was performed on ChipWhisperer CW308 UFO Board with STM32F0 target. Approximately 800 power traces were needed for succesful attack. Leakage information from XOR was used to attack cipher key. The main contribution of this work is power model of binary addition including carry propagation.

Article

10.1016/j.micpro.2021.104311

Department of Digital Design

Side-channel attacks pose a severe threat to both software and hardware cryptographic implementations. Current literature presents various countermeasures against these kinds of attacks, based on approaches such as hiding or masking, implemented either in software, or on register-transfer level or gate level in hardware. However, emerging trends in hardware design lean towards a system-level approach, allowing for faster, less error-prone, design process, an efficient hardware/software co-design, or sophisticated validation, verification, and (co)simulation strategies. In this paper, we propose a Boolean masking scheme suitable for high-level synthesis of substitution-permutation network-based encryption. We implement both unprotected and protected PRESENT, AES/Rijndael and Serpent encryption in C language, utilizing the concept of dynamic logic reconfiguration, synthesize it for Xilinx FPGA, and we compare our results regarding time and area utilization. We evaluate the effectiveness of proposed countermeasures using both specific and non-specific t-test leakage assessment methodology. We discuss the leakage assessment results, and we identify and discuss the related limitations of the system-level approach and the high-level synthesis.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/DSD53832.2021.00057

Department of Digital Design

Masking is a powerful instrument for protecting cryptographic devices against side-channel analysis. Multiple masking schemes were introduced providing provable security against attacks of arbitrary order even in the presence of glitches. When a device is a part of some safety-critical system, it needs to meet dependability requirements; therefore, it should be protected against spontaneously occurring faults. Existing commonly used fault-tolerance architectures involve high area overhead as so as the masking schemes do. In this paper, we propose architectures meeting dependability properties of simple modular-redundancy schemes and SCA resistance of masking schemes, but decreasing the area overhead utilizing the randomness involved in the masking schemes. We compare our Masked Duplex architecture with Triple Modular Redundancy. While using one less redundant module, our architecture saves around 20% of the area in comparison with TMR in the case of Threshold Implementation of PRESENT cipher, promising more savings for more complex cryptographic schemes

Article

10.1016/j.micpro.2019.102858

Department of Digital Design

Correlation power analysis (CPA) is one of the most common side-channel attacks today, posing a threat to many modern ciphers, including AES. In the final step of this attack, the cipher key is usually extracted by the attacker by visually examining the correlation traces for each key guess. The naïve way to extract the correct key algorithmically is selecting the key guess with the maximum Pearson correlation coefficient. We propose another key distinguisher based on a significant change in the correlation trace rather than on the absolute value of the coefficient. Our approach performs better than the standard maximization, especially in the noisy environment, and it allows to significantly reduce the number of acquired power traces necessary to successfully mount an attack in noisy environment, and in some cases make the attack even feasible.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/MECO.2019.8760033

Department of Digital Design

Side-channel analysis pose a serious threat to many modern cryptosystems. Using Correlation power analysis, attacker may be able to recover the cipher key and therefore jeopardize the whole cryptosystem, which is why many countermeasures are being developed. These countermeasures are typically effective against first-order attacks. However, protected implementations may still be vulnerable to higher-order analysis. In this paper, we compare different approaches to the higher-order analysis regarding their mathematical and performance properties. We focus on Correlation power analysis attack and the test vector leakage assesment using Welch’s t-test, we optimize and accelerate discussed algorithms using CPU and GPU, and we present our experimental results and remarks

Proceedings paper

Department of Digital Design

Side-channel cryptanalysis pose a serious threat to many modern cryptographic systems. Typical scenario of a side-channel attack consists of an active phase, where data are acquired, and of an analytical phase, where the data get examined and evaluated. This work presents a software toolkit which includes support for both phases of the side-channel attack. The toolkit consists of non-interactive text-based utilities with modular plug-in architecture. The measurement utility supports different oscilloscopes, target interfaces and measurement scenarios. The evaluation utilities include support for the test vector leakage assessment and the CPA attack. Different approaches to the algorithmical evaluation of the attack are implemented in order to extract the cipher key. The visualisation utility allows for the visual examination of the attack results by the user. The toolkit aims to be multiplatform and it is written using C/C++ with performance in mind. Time-demanding operations (such as the statistical analysis) are accelerated using OpenMP and OpenCL for an efficient computation on both CPU and GPU devices.

Proceedings paper

Department of Digital Design

This work summarizes the author's research in the area of side-channel analysis. It focuses on two main topics: efficient implementations of attacks and fault-tolerant countermeasures. Published results of the author are briefly presented and recent unpublished results dedicated to fault-tolerant architectures exploiting randomness of masking schemes to decrease the overhead are described. The structure of this paper corresponds to the structure of author's forthcoming dissertation thesis.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/DSD.2018.00098

Department of Digital Design

Correlation power analysis (CPA) is one of the most common side channel attacks today, posing a threat to many modern ciphers, including AES. The simplest method to extract the correct key guess is selecting the guess with the maximum Pearson correlation coefficient. We propose another distinguisher based on a significant change in the correlation trace rather than on the absolute value of the coefficient. Our approach performs better than the standard CPA, especially in the noisy environment.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/DSD.2018.00092

Department of Digital Design

This paper describes the technique of Dummy Rounds as a countermeasure against DPA in hardware implementation of round-based ciphers. Its principle is inspired by several well-known countermeasures used in hardware as Hiding and Dynamic Reconfiguration as well as countermeasures used in software implementations as Dummy cycles, Random order execution or Hiding in time. Being inspired by countermeasures based on dynamic reconfiguration, this method combines hiding of power consumption with hiding in time. In this work we also discuss the amount of randomness available for the control of the computation.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/MECO.2018.8406012

Department of Digital Design

Side-channel attacks, including differential power analysis (DPA), are still an emerging topic. To make a deep research about DPA, one needs to be able to perform it as fast as possible. There are many possible ways to decrease the time of the attack. In this paper, we propose a way to decrease the duration of the correlation computations of this kind of attack by decreasing the number of samples per a power trace using an integration based aggregation method. We comprehensively describe this idea and present the results of an experimental evaluation focusing on the time efficiency of this approach.

Invited/Awarded proceedings paper

Department of Digital Design

Fault tolerance and attack resistance are design properties possibly demanded at the same time. There are many design methods providing one of these properties, but in both cases they introduce considerable area and power overhead. Unfortunately, the overhead of fault tolerant design could negatively influence the attack resistance and vice versa, the overhead of attack resistant design could negatively influence the fault tolerance. The main aim of this research is determination of the mutual influence and suggestion of new design methods combining both fault tolerance and attack resistance.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/DSD.2017.76

Department of Digital Design

As the security is becoming more and more important these days, we still should not forget about reliability. When designing a cryptographic device for some mission-critical or another reliability demanding system, we need to make the device not only attack-resistant, but also fault-tolerant. There are many common fault-tolerant digital design techniques, however, it is questionable, how these techniques affect the attack-resistance. Do they make the device more vulnerable e.g. to side-channel attacks? In our work we focused on finding the answer to this question. We experimentally evaluated the influence of information redundancy, space redundancy and time redundancy techniques on resistance against power analysis attack. In this paper we present our observations.

Article

10.1016/j.micpro.2017.04.014

Department of Digital Design

Many electronic systems have to fulfill strict dependability properties, especially both fault tolerance and attack resistance. Intuitively, these requirements may seem to contradict each other. A study and an experiment description of the possible methods how to measure these impacts as well as result of first experiments are presented in this paper. Specifically, how basic passive hardware redundancy design methods affects resistance against differential power analysis attack and how the whole design can be modified to increase attack resistance will be discussed.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/DDECS.2017.7934563

Department of Digital Design

Differential power analysis (DPA) is one of the most common side channel attacks. To perform this attack we need to calculate a large amount of correlation coefficients. This amount is even higher when attacking FPGAs or ASICs, for higher order attacks and especially for attacking DPA protected devices. This article explains different approaches to the calculation of correlations, describes our implementation of these approaches and presents a detailed comparison considering their performance and their properties for a practical usage.

Proceedings paper

Department of Digital Design

This research is about possibilities of connecting fault tolerant and attack resistant digital design methods. These properties often contradict each other and both of them cause high area and power consumption overhead. We currently focus on mutual influence of these properties and our future objective is to find some new design method increasing both fault tolerance and attack resistance at the same time.

Proceedings paper

10.1109/MECO.2016.7525685

Department of Digital Design

Many electronic systems has to fulfill strict dependability properties, especially both fault tolerance and attack resistance. These requirements usually contradict each other. The study and experiment descriptions of the possible methods how to measure these impacts are presented in this paper. Specifically, how fault-tolerant design methods affects resistance against differential power analysis attack and how the whole design can be modified to increase attack resistance will be discussed.