Embedded systems are increasingly ubiquitous. Many of them have security requirements such as smart cards, mobile phones, and internet connected appliances. It can be a challenge to fulfill security requirements due to the constrained nature of embedded devices. This security challenge is worsened by the possibility of implementation attacks. Despite well formulated cryptosystems being used, the underlying hardware can often undermine any security proven on paper. If a secret key is at play, an adversary has a chance of revealing it by simply looking at the power variation. Additionally, an adversary can tamper with an embedded system's environment to get it to skip a security check or generate side channel information.
Any adversary with physical access to an embedded system can conduct such implementation attacks. It is the focus of this work to explore different countermeasures against both side channel and fault attacks. A new countermeasure call Intra-instruction Redundancy, based on bit-slicing, or N-bit SIMD processing, is proposed. Another challenge with implementing countermeasures against implementation attacks, is that they need to be able to be combined. Most proposed side channel countermeasures do not prevent fault injection and vice versa. Combining them is non-trivial as demonstrated with a combined implementation attack. / Master of Science
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/78685 |
| Date | 09 August 2017 |
| Creators | Patrick, Conor Persson |
| Contributors | Electrical and Computer Engineering, Schaumont, Patrick R., Nazhandali, Leyla, Gerdes, Ryan M. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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