Among the various threats to secure ICs, many are semi-invasive in the sense that their application requires the removal of the package to gain access to either the front or back of the target IC. Despite this stringent application requirements, little attention is paid to embedded techniques aiming at checking the package's integrity. This paper explores the feasibility of verifying the package integrity of microcontrollers by examining their thermal dissipation capability.

There has been significant progress over the past seven years in model reverse engineering (RE) for neural network (NN) hardware. Although there has been systematization of knowledge (SoK) in an overall sense, however, the treatment from the hardware perspective has been far from adequate. To bridge this gap, this paper systematically categorizes the types of NN hardware used prevalently by the industry/academia, and also the model RE attacks/defenses published in each category. Further, we...

We present the first comprehensive approach for detecting and analyzing symmetric cryptographic primitives in gate-level descriptions of hardware. To capture both ASICs and FPGAs, we model the hardware as a directed graph, where gates become nodes and wires become edges. For modern chips, those graphs can easily consist of hundreds of thousands of nodes. More abstractly, we find subgraphs corresponding to cryptographic primitives in a potentially huge graph, the sea-of-gates, describing an...

Software obfuscation is a powerful tool to protect the intellectual property or secret keys inside programs. Strong software obfuscation is crucial in the context of untrusted execution environments (e.g., subject to malware infection) or to face potentially malicious users trying to reverse-engineer a sensitive program. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art of pure software-based obfuscation (including white-box cryptography) is either insecure or infeasible in practice. This work...

Remote side-channel attacks on processors exploit hardware and micro-architectural effects observable from software measurements. So far, the analysis of micro-architectural leakages over physical side-channels (power consumption, electromagnetic field) received little treatment. In this paper, we argue that those attacks are a serious threat, especially against systems such as smartphones and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices which are physically exposed to the end-user. Namely, we show that...

We introduce a novel side-channel-based reverse engineering technique capable of reconstructing a procedure solely from inputs, outputs, and traces of execution. Beyond generic restrictions, we do not assume any prior knowledge of the procedure or the chip it operates on. These restrictions confine our analysis to 8-bit RISC constant-time software implementations. Specifically, we demonstrate the feasibility of reconstructing a symmetric cryptographic cipher, even in scenarios where...

The open-source hardware IP model has recently started gaining popularity in the developer community. This model offers the integrated circuit (IC) developers wider standardization, faster time-to-market and richer platform for research. In addition, open-source hardware conforms to the Kerckhoff’s principle of a publicly-known algorithm and thus helps to enhance security. However, when security comes into consideration, source transparency is only one part of the solution. A complex global...

In this work, we set out to create a subversion resilient authenticated key exchange protocol. The first step was to design a meaningful security model for this primitive, and our goal was to avoid using building blocks like reverse firewalls and public watchdogs. We wanted to exclude these kinds of tools because we desired that our protocols to be self contained in the sense that we could prove security without relying on some outside, tamper-proof party. To define the model, we began by...

Millions of smart contracts have been deployed onto Ethereum for providing various services, whose functions can be invoked. For this purpose, the caller needs to know the function signature of a callee, which includes its function id and parameter types. Such signatures are critical to many applications focusing on smart contracts, e.g., reverse engineering, fuzzing, attack detection, and profiling. Unfortunately, it is challenging to recover the function signatures from contract bytecode,...

Spiking neural networks gain attention due to low power properties and event-based operation, making them suitable for usage in resource constrained embedded devices. Such edge devices allow physical access opening the door for side-channel analysis. In this work, we reverse engineer the parameters of a feed-forward spiking neural network implementation with correlation power analysis. Localized measurements of electro-magnetic emanations enable our attack, despite inherent parallelism and...

We conduct a security analysis of the e-voting protocol used for the largest political election using e-voting in the world, the 2022 French legislative election for the citizens overseas. Due to a lack of system and threat model specifications, we built and contributed such specifications by studying the French legal framework and by reverse-engineering the code base accessible to the voters. Our analysis reveals that this protocol is affected by two design-level and implementation-level...

Numerous security vulnerability assessment techniques urge precise and fast finite state machines (FSMs) extraction from the design under evaluation. Sequential logic locking, watermark insertion, fault-injection assessment of a System-ona- Chip (SoC) control flow, information leakage assessment, and reverse engineering at gate-level abstraction, to name a few, require precise FSM extraction from the synthesized netlist of the design. Unfortunately, no reliable solutions are currently...

At the early stage of the design process, many security vulnerability assessment solutions require fast and precise extraction of the finite state machines (FSMs) present in the register-transfer level (RTL) description of the design. FSMs should be accurately extracted for watermark insertion, fault injection assessment of control paths in a system-on-chip (SoC), information leakage assessment, control-flow reverse engineering in RTL abstraction, logic obfuscation, etc. However, it is quite...

There are many recent results on reverse-engineering (potentially hidden) structure in cryptographic S-boxes. The problem of recovering structure in the other main building block of symmetric cryptographic primitives, namely, the linear layer, has not been paid that much attention so far. To fill this gap, in this work, we develop a systematic approach to decomposing structure in the linear layer of a substitution-permutation network (SPN), covering the case in which the specification of the...

Can we hope to provide provable security against model extraction attacks? As a step towards a theoretical study of this question, we unify and abstract a wide range of "observational" model extraction defenses (OMEDs) --- roughly, those that attempt to detect model extraction by analyzing the distribution over the adversary's queries. To accompany the abstract OMED, we define the notion of complete OMEDs --- when benign clients can freely interact with the model --- and sound OMEDs --- when...

An integrated circuit is subject to a number of attacks including information leakage, side-channel attacks, fault-injection, malicious change, reverse engineering, and piracy. Majority of these attacks take advantage of physical placement and routing of cells and interconnects. Several measures have already been proposed to deal with security issues of the high level functional design and logic synthesis. However, to ensure end-to-end trustworthy IC design flow, it is necessary to have...

Private set union (PSU) protocol enables two parties, each holding a set, to compute the union of their sets without revealing anything else to either party. So far, there are two known approaches for constructing PSU protocols. The first mainly depends on additively homomorphic encryption (AHE), which is generally inefficient since it needs to perform a non-constant number of homomorphic computations on each item. The second is mainly based on oblivious transfer and symmetric-key...

Hardware obfuscation through redundancy addition is a well-known countermeasure against reverse engineering. For FPGA designs, such a technique can be implemented with a small overhead, however, its effectiveness is heavily dependent on the stealthiness of the redundant elements. Hardware opaque predicates can provide adequately stealthy constant values that can be used for obfuscation. However, in this report, we show that such obfuscation schemes can be defeated by ensuring the full...

Logic locking is a design concealment mechanism for protecting the IPs integrated into modern System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures from a wide range of hardware security threats at the IC manufacturing supply chain. Logic locking primarily helps the designer to protect the IPs against reverse engineering, IP piracy, overproduction, and unauthorized activation. For more than a decade, the research studies that carried out on this paradigm has been immense, in which the applicability,...

ARM-based Android smartphones rely on the TrustZone hardware support for a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to implement security-sensitive functions. The TEE runs a separate, isolated, TrustZone Operating System (TZOS), in parallel to Android. The implementation of the cryptographic functions within the TZOS is left to the device vendors, who create proprietary undocumented designs. In this work, we expose the cryptographic design and implementation of Android's Hardware-Backed...

Intellectual Property (IP) thefts of trained machine learning (ML) models through side-channel attacks on inference engines are becoming a major threat. Indeed, several recent works have shown reverse engineering of the model internals using such attacks, but the research on building defenses is largely unexplored. There is a critical need to efficiently and securely transform those defenses from cryptography such as masking to ML frameworks. Existing works, however, revealed that a...

The discipline of reverse engineering integrated circuits (ICs) is as old as the technology itself. It grew out of the need to analyze competitor’s products and detect possible IP infringements. In recent years, the growing hardware Trojan threat motivated a fresh research interest in the topic. The process of IC reverse engineering comprises two steps: netlist extraction and specification discovery. While the process of netlist extraction is rather well understood and established techniques...

Over the last decade attacks have repetitively demonstrated that bitstream protection for SRAM-based FPGAs is a persistent problem without a satisfying solution in practice. Hence, real-world hardware designs are prone to intellectual property infringement and malicious manipulation as they are not adequately protected against reverse-engineering. In this work, we first review state-of-the-art solutions from industry and academia and demonstrate their ineffectiveness with respect to...

Public knowledge about the structure of a cryptographic system is a standard assumption in the literature and algorithms are expected to guarantee security in a setting where only the encryption key is kept secret. Nevertheless, undisclosed proprietary cryptographic algorithms still find widespread use in applications both in the civil and military domains. Even though side-channel-based reverse engineering attacks that recover the hidden components of custom cryptosystems have been...

Micro-architectural leakage is a reality even on low- to midrange commercial processors. Dealing with it is expensive, because micro-architectural leakage is often only discovered after implementation choices have been made (i.e. when evaluating the concrete implementation). We demonstrate that it is feasible, using a recent leakage modelling technique, to reverse engineer significant elements of the micro-architectural leakage of a mid-range commercial processor in a “grey-box” setting. Our...

In recent years machine learning has become increasingly mainstream across industries. Additionally, Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) accelerators are widely deployed in various neural network (NN) applications, including image recognition for autonomous vehicles and natural language processing, among others. Since training a powerful network requires expensive data collection and computing power, its design and parameters are often considered a secret intellectual property of their...

It is a well-known fact that the power consumption during certain stages of a cryptographic algorithm exhibits a strong correlation with the Hamming Weight of its underlying variables. This phenomenon has been widely exploited in the cryptographic literature in various attacks targeting a broad range of schemes such as block ciphers or public-key cryptosystems. A common way of breaking this correlation is through the inclusion of countermeasures involving additional randomness into the...

This paper proposes the first cache timing side-channel attack on one of Apple’s mobile devices. Utilizing a recent, permanent exploit named checkm8, we reverse-engineered Apple’s BootROM and created a powerful toolkit for running arbitrary hardware security experiments on Apple’s in-house designed ARM systems-on-a-chip (SoC). Using this toolkit, we then implement an access-driven cache timing attack (in the style of PRIME+PROBE) as a proof-of-concept illustrator. The advanced hardware...

Design-hiding techniques are a central piece of academic and industrial efforts to protect electronic circuits from being reverse-engineered. However, these techniques have lacked a principled foundation to guide their design and security evaluation, leading to a long line of broken schemes. In this paper, we begin to lay this missing foundation. We establish formal syntax for design-hiding (DH) schemes, a cryptographic primitive that encompasses all known design-stage methods to hide the...

For safe resource management - an effective mechanism/system is necessary that identifies a person and his rights to these resources, using an appropriate key, and its degree of security determines not only the property, but sometimes even the life of its owner. For several decades, it has been based on the security of (bio)material keys, which only guarantee their own authenticity, but not their owner, due to weak of static password protection. In the article will be presented the i-Chip an...

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNN) have become an important type of intellectual property due to their high performance on various classification tasks. As a result, DNN stealing attacks have emerged. Many attack surfaces have been exploited, among which cache timing side-channel attacks are hugely problematic because they do not need physical probing or direct interaction with the victim to estimate the DNN model. However, existing cache-side-channel-based DNN reverse engineering...

Bitstream reverse engineering is traditionally associated with Intellectual Property (IP) theft. Another, less known, threat deriving from that is bitstream modification attacks. It has been shown that the secret key can be extracted from FPGA implementations of cryptographic algorithms by injecting faults directly into the bitstream. Such bitstream modification attacks rely on changing the content of Look Up Tables (LUTs). Therefore, related countermeasures aim to make the task...

Reverse engineering of integrated circuits, i.e., understanding the internals of IC, is required for many benign and malicious applications. Examples of the former are detection of patent infringements, hardware Trojans or IP-theft, as well as interface recovery and defect analysis, while malicious applications include IP-theft and finding insertion points for hardware Trojans. However, regardless of the application, the reverse engineer initially starts with a large unstructured netlist,...

Hardware obfuscation is widely used in practice to counteract reverse engineering. In recent years, low-level obfuscation via camouflaged gates has been increasingly discussed in the scientific community and industry. In contrast to classical high-level obfuscation, such gates result in recovery of an erroneous netlist. This technology has so far been regarded as a purely defensive tool. We show that low-level obfuscation is in fact a double-edged sword that can also enable stealthy...

Physically unclonable function (PUF) is a technology to generate a device-unique identifier using process variation. PUF enables a cryptographic key that appears only when the chip is active, providing an efficient countermeasure against reverse-engineering attacks. In this paper, we explore the data conversion that digitizes a physical quantity representing PUF’s uniqueness into a numerical value as a new attack surface. We focus on time-to-digital converter (TDC) that converts time...

In this paper we present a bitstream modification attack on the Trivium cipher, an international standard under ISO/IEC 29192-3. By changing the content of three LUTs in the bitstream, we reduce the non-linear state updating function of Trivium to a linear one. This makes it possible to recover the key from 288 keystream bits using at most $2^{19.41}$ operations. We also propose a countermeasure against bitstream modification attacks which obfuscates the bitstream using dummy and camouflaged...

In 2017, the first CHES Capture the Flag Challenge was organized in an effort to promote good design candidates for white-box cryptography. In particular, the challenge assessed the security of the designs with regard to key extraction attacks. A total of 94 candidate programs were submitted, and all of them were broken eventually. Even though most candidates were broken within a few hours, some candidates remained robust against key extraction attacks for several days, and even weeks. In...

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) provide means to generate chip individual keys, especially for low-cost applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT). They are intrinsically robust against reverse engineering, and more cost-effective than non-volatile memory (NVM). For several PUF primitives, countermeasures have been proposed to mitigate side-channel weaknesses. However, most mitigation techniques require substantial design effort and/or complexity overhead, which cannot be...

SNOW 3G is one of the core algorithms for confidentiality and integrity in several 3GPP wireless communication standards, including the new Next Generation (NG) 5G. It is believed to be resistant to classical cryptanalysis. In this paper, we show that a key can be extracted from an unprotected FPGA implementation of SNOW 3G by a fault attack. The faults are injected by modifying the content of Look- Up Tables (LUTs) directly in the bitstream. The main challenge is to identify target LUTs...

CAS-Lock (cascaded locking) is a SAT-resilient locking technique, which can simultaneously thwart SAT and bypass attack, while maintaining non-trivial output corruptibility. Despite all of its theoretical guarantees, in this report we expose a serious flaw in its design that can be exploited to break CAS-Lock. Further, this attack neither requires access to a reverse-engineered netlist, nor it requires a working oracle with the correct key loaded onto the chip's memory. We demonstrate that...

In today’s Integrated Circuit (IC) production chains, a designer’s valuable Intellectual Property (IP) is transparent to diverse stakeholders and thus inevitably prone to piracy. To protect against this threat, numerous defenses based on the obfuscation of a circuit’s control path, i.e. Finite State Machine (FSM), have been proposed and are commonly believed to be secure. However, the security of these sequential obfuscation schemes is doubtful since realistic capabilities of reverse...

Persistent faults mark a new class of injections that perturb lookup tables within block ciphers with the overall goal of recovering the encryption key. Unlike earlier fault types persistent faults remain intact over many encryptions until the affected device is rebooted, thus allowing an adversary to collect a multitude of correct and faulty ciphertexts. It was shown to be an efficient and effective attack against substitution-permutation networks. In this paper, the scope of persistent...

Hardware reverse engineering is a powerful and universal tool for both security engineers and adversaries. From a defensive perspective, it allows for detection of intellectual property infringements and hardware Trojans, while it simultaneously can be used for product piracy and malicious circuit manipulations. From a designer’s perspective, it is crucial to have an estimate of the costs associated with reverse engineering, yet little is known about this, especially when dealing with...

Among numerous applications, besides cryptocurrencies, the Blockchain offers inherent properties beneficial for the management of supply chains, where data is shared between trusted and untrusted parties. Electronics supply chain serves as a prime example of such chains, where one of the major players, i.e., a foundry, can be untrusted. Hardware obfuscation techniques, namely logic locking, and IC camouflaging have been developed to mislead an adversary aiming at reverse- engineering and...

Logic locking has been proposed as an obfuscation technique to protect outsourced IC designs from Intellectual Property (IP) piracy by untrusted entities in the design and fabrication process. It obfuscates the netlist by adding extra key-gates, to mislead an adversary, whose aim is to reverse engineer the netlist. The correct functionality will be obtained only if a correct key is applied to the key-gates. The key is written into a nonvolatile memory (NVM) after the fabrication by the IP...

I am making this work from August 1998 available for historical reasons. It has been cited as an ``unpublished manuscript'' more than two dozen times over the years -- even though it has not been publicly available anywhere for almost 20 years. The short memo describes a simple non-intrusive reverse engineering technique against Russian GOST chips. The technique is based on a slide attack. This may be historically interesting since slide attacks had not been ``invented yet'', at least in...

S-boxes are functions with an input so small that the simplest way to specify them is their lookup table (LUT). Unfortunately, some algorithm designers exploit this fact to avoid providing the algorithm used to generate said lookup table. In this paper, we provide tools for finding the hidden structure in an S-box or to identify it as the output of a complex generation process rather than a random sample. We introduce various "anomalies". These real numbers are such that a property with...

Invasive or semi-invasive attacks require, of course, because of their nature, the removal of metal layers or at least the package de-capsulation of the chip. For many people - not expert in those sample preparation techniques - the simple access to the die surface and the observation of the chip structure after metal layers removal are the first obstacles to conduct an attack. In another direction, the development of embedded secure devices, sometime with very dense and complex assembly...

Streebog and Kuznyechik are the latest symmetric cryptographic primitives standardized by the Russian GOST. They share the same S-Box, $\pi$, whose design process was not described by its authors. In previous works, Biryukov, Perrin and Udovenko recovered two completely different decompositions of this S-Box. We revisit their results and identify a third decomposition of $\pi$. It is an instance of a fairly small family of permutations operating on $2m$ bits which we call TKlog and which...

While financially advantageous, outsourcing key steps such as testing to potentially untrusted Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) companies may pose a risk of compromising on-chip assets. Obfuscation of scan chains is a technique that hides the actual scan data from the untrusted testers; logic inserted between the scan cells, driven by a secret key, hide the transformation functions between the scan- in stimulus (scan-out response) and the delivered scan pattern (captured...

Machine learning has become mainstream across industries. In this work we pose the following question: Is it possible to reverse engineer a neural network by using only side-channel information? We answer the question affirmatively. To this end, we consider a multi layer perceptron as the machine learning architecture of choice and assume a passive attacker capable of measuring only passive side-channels like power, electromagnetic radiation, and timing. We conduct all experiments on real...

Lightweight block ciphers rely on simple operations to allow compact implementation. Thanks to its efficiency, bit permutation has emerged as an optimal choice for state-wise diffusion. It can be implemented by simple wiring or shifts. However, as recently shown by Spectre and Meltdown attacks, efficiency and security often go against each other. In this work, we show how bit permutations introduce a side-channel vulnerability that can be exploited to extract the secret key from the cipher....

White-box cryptography protects key extraction from software implementations of cryptographic primitives. It is widely deployed in DRM and mobile payment applications in which a malicious attacker might control the entire execution environment. So far, no provably secure white-box implementation of AES has been put forward, and all the published practical constructions are vulnerable to differential computation analysis (DCA) and differential fault analysis (DFA). As a consequence, the...

The disassembled code of an executable program can be seen as a graph representing the possible sequence of instructions (Control Flow Graph). grap is a YARA-like tool, completely open-source, and able to detect graph patterns, defined by the analyst, within an executable program. We used grap to detect cryptographic algorithms: we created patterns for AES and ChaCha20 that are based on parts of the assembly code produced by compiling popular implementations (available in LibreSSL and...

Cellular Automata (CA) represent an interesting approach to design Substitution Boxes (S-boxes) having good cryptographic properties and low implementation costs. From the cryptographic perspective, up to now there have been only ad-hoc studies about specific kinds of CA, the best known example being the $\chi$ nonlinear transformation used in Keccak. In this paper, we undertake a systematic investigation of the cryptographic properties of S-boxes defined by CA, proving some upper bounds on...

In recent years, performance counters have been used as a side channel source for the branch mispredictions which has been used to attack ciphers with user privileges. However, existing research considers blinding techniques, like scalar blinding, scalar splitting as a mechanism of thwarting such attacks. In this endeavour, we reverse engineer the undisclosed model of Intel’s Broadwell and Sandybridge branch predictor and further utilize the largely unexplored perf ioctl calls in sampling...

Modern Integrated Circuits (ICs) employ several classes of countermeasures to mitigate physical attacks. Recently, a powerful semi-invasive attack relying on optical contactless probing has been introduced, which can assist the attacker in circumventing the integrated countermeasures and probe the secret data on a chip. This attack can be mounted using IC debug tools from the backside of the chip. The first published attack based on this technique was conducted against a proof-of-concept...

Hardware manipulations pose a serious threat to numerous systems, ranging from a myriad of smart-X devices to military systems. In many attack scenarios an adversary merely has access to the low-level, potentially obfuscated gate-level netlist. In general, the attacker possesses minimal information and faces the costly and time-consuming task of reverse engineering the design to identify security-critical circuitry, followed by the insertion of a meaningful hardware Trojan. These challenges...

Lightweight cryptography has been one of the "hot topics" in symmetric cryptography in the recent years. A huge number of lightweight algorithms have been published, standardized and/or used in commercial products. In this paper, we discuss the different implementation constraints that a "lightweight" algorithm is usually designed to satisfy in both the software and the hardware case. We also present an extensive survey of all lightweight symmetric primitives we are aware of. It covers...

Despite the fact that all current scientific white-box approaches of standardized cryptographic primitives have been publicly broken, these attacks require knowledge of the internal data representation used by the implementation. In practice, the level of implementation knowledge required is only attainable through significant reverse engineering efforts. In this paper we describe new approaches to assess the security of white-box implementations which require neither knowledge about the...

With the adoption of a globalized and distributed IC design flow, IP piracy, reverse engineering, and counterfeiting threats are becoming more prevalent. Logic obfuscation techniques including logic locking and IC camouflaging have been developed to address these emergent challenges. A major challenge for logic locking and camouflaging techniques is to resist Boolean satisfiability (SAT) based attacks that can circumvent state-of-the-art solutions within minutes. Over the past year, multiple...

In side channel attack (SCA) studies, it is widely believed that unprotected implementations leak information about the intermediate states of the internal cryptographic process. However, directly recovering the intermediate states is not common practice in today's SCA study. Instead, most SCAs exploit the leakages in a "guess-and-determine" way, where they take a partial key guess, compute the corresponding intermediate states, then try to identify which one fits the observed leakages...

This contribution is concerned with the question whether an adversary can automatically manipulate an unknown FPGA bitstream realizing a cryptographic primitive such that the underlying secret key is revealed. In general, if an attacker has full knowledge about the bitstream structure and can make changes to the target FPGA design, she can alter the bitstream leading to key recovery. However, this requires challenging reverse-engineering steps in practice. We argue that this is a major...

Cloud services keep gaining popularity despite the security concerns. While non-sensitive data is easily trusted to cloud, security critical data and applications are not. The main concern with the cloud is the shared resources like the CPU, memory and even the network adapter that provide subtle side-channels to malicious parties. We argue that these side-channels indeed leak fine grained, sensitive information and enable key recovery attacks on the cloud. Even further, as a quick scan in...

The existence of Almost Perfect Non-linear (APN) permutations operating on an even number of bits has been a long standing open question until Dillon et al., who work for the NSA, provided an example on 6 bits in 2009. In this paper, we apply methods intended to reverse-engineer S-Boxes with unknown structure to this permutation and find a simple decomposition relying on the cube function over $GF(2^3)$. More precisely, we show that it is a particular case of a permutation structure we...

In December 2015, Juniper Networks announced that unknown attackers had added unauthorized code to ScreenOS, the operating system for their NetScreen VPN routers. This code created two vulnerabilities: an authentication bypass that enabled remote administrative access, and a second vulnerability that allowed passive decryption of VPN traffic. Reverse engineering of ScreenOS binaries revealed that the first of these vulnerabilities was a conventional back door in the SSH password checker....

In May 2012, a highly advanced malware for espionage dubbed Flame was found targeting the Middle-East. As it turned out, it used a forged signature to infect Windows machines by MITM-ing Windows Update. Using counter-cryptanalysis, Stevens found that the forged signature was made possible by a chosen-prefix attack on MD5 \cite{DBLP:conf/crypto/Stevens13}. He uncovered some details that prove that this attack differs from collision attacks in the public literature, yet many questions about...

The Russian Federation's standardization agency has recently published a hash function called Streebog and a 128-bit block cipher called Kuznyechik. Both of these algorithms use the same 8-bit S-Box but its design rationale was never made public. In this paper, we reverse-engineer this S-Box and reveal its hidden structure. It is based on a sort of 2-round Feistel Network where exclusive-or is replaced by a finite field multiplication. This structure is hidden by two different linear layers...

Side-channel and fault injection analyses are well-known domains that have been used for years to evaluate the resistance of hardware based products. These techniques remain a threat for the secret assets embedded in products like smart cards or System On Chip. But most of these products contain nowadays several strong protections rendering side-channel and fault attacks difficult or inefficient. For two decades embedded cryptography for payment, pay tv, identity areas have relied a lot on...

S-Boxes are the key components of many cryptographic primitives and designing them to improve resilience to attacks such as linear or differential cryptanalysis is well understood. In this paper, we investigate techniques that can be used to reverse-engineer S-box design and illustrate those by studying the S-Box $F$ of the Skipjack block cipher whose design process so far remained secret. We first show that the linear properties of $F$ are far from random and propose a design criteria,...

Modern Intel processors use an undisclosed hash function to map memory lines into last-level cache slices. In this work we develop a technique for reverse-engineering the hash function. We apply the technique to a 6-core Intel processor and demonstrate that knowledge of this hash function can facilitate cache-based side channel attacks, reducing the amount of work required for profiling the cache by three orders of magnitude. We also show how using the hash function we can double the number...

It has been six years since Ristenpart et al. demonstrated the viability of co-location and provided the first concrete evidence for sensitive information leakage on a commercial cloud. We show that co-location can be achieved and detected by monitoring the last level cache in public clouds. More significantly, we present a full-fledged attack that exploits subtle leakages to recover RSA decryption keys from a co-located instance. We target a recently patched Libgcrypt RSA implementation by...

The last hash function and block cipher standardized by the Russian standardization body (GOST) both use the same S-Box. It is also used by an independent CAESAR candidate. This transformation is only specified as a look up table and the reason behind its choice is unknown. We managed to reverse-engineer this S-Box and describe its unpublished structure. Our decomposition allows a much more efficient hardware implementation but the choice of the components used is puzzling from a...

As part of the revelations about the NSA activities, the notion of interdiction has become known to the public: the interception of deliveries to manipulate hardware in a way that backdoors are introduced. Manipulations can occur on the firmware or at hardware level. With respect to hardware, FPGAs are particular interesting targets as they can be altered by manipulating the corresponding bitstream which configures the device. In this paper, we demonstrate the first successful real-world...

Although all current scientific white-box approaches of standardized cryptographic primitives are broken, there is still a large number of companies which sell "secure" white-box products. In this paper a new approach to assess the security of white-box implementations is presented which requires neither knowledge about the look-up tables used nor any reverse engineering effort. This differential computation analysis (DCA) attack is the software counterpart of the differential power analysis...

Dividing last level caches into slices is a popular method to prevent memory accesses from becoming a bottleneck on modern multicore processors. In order to assess and understand the benefits of cache slicing in detail, a precise knowledge of implementation details such as the slice selection algorithm are of high importance. However, slice selection methods are mostly unstudied, and processor manufacturers choose not to publish their designs, nor their design rationale. In this paper, we...

A persistent problem with program execution, despite numerous mitigation attempts, is its inherent vulnerability to the injection of malicious code. Equally unsolved is the susceptibility of firmware to reverse engineering, which undermines the manufacturer's code confidentiality. We propose an approach that solves both kinds of security problems employing instruction-level code encryption combined with the use of a physical unclonable function (PUF). Our novel Secure Execution PUF-based...

Detecting hardware trojans is a difficult task in general. In this article we study hardware trojan horses insertion and detection in cryptographic intellectual property (IP) blocks. The context is that of a fabless design house that sells IP blocks as GDSII hard macros, and wants to check that final products have not been infected by trojans during the foundry stage. First, we show the efficiency of a medium cost hardware trojans detection method if the placement or the routing have been...

This paper investigates a novel attack vector against cryptography realized on FPGAs, which poses a serious threat to real-world applications.We demonstrate how a targeted bitstream modification can seriously weaken cryptographic algorithms, which we show with the examples of AES and 3DES. The attack is performed by modifying the FPGA bitstream that configures the hardware elements during initialization. Recently, it has been shown that cloning of FPGA designs is feasible, even if the...

A successful detection of the stealthy dopant-level circuit (trojan), proposed by Becker et al. at CHES 2013, is reported. Contrary to an assumption made by Becker et al., dopant types in active region are visible with either scanning electron microscopy (SEM) or focused ion beam (FIB) imaging. The successful measurement is explained by an LSI failure analysis technique called the passive voltage contrast. The experiments are conducted by measuring a dedicated chip. The chip uses the...

The secret information, which is embedded in integrated circuit (IC) devices such as a smart card, has the risk of theft by reverse engineering (RE). The circuit design of IC can be stolen by the RE, and the counterfeit can be illegally fabricated. Therefore, the secure IC device requires the circuit architecture protected from the RE attacks. This paper proposes the diffusion programmable device (DPD) architecture as a countermeasure against the RE. A look-up table circuit based on the DPD...

Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) is commonly used to recover secret keys involved in the implementation of publicly known cryptographic algorithms. On the other hand, Side-Channel Analysis for Reverse Engineering (SCARE) considers an adversary who aims at recovering the secret design of some cryptographic algorithm from its implementation. Most of previously published SCARE attacks enable the recovery of some secret parts of a cipher design --{\it e.g.} the substitution box(es)-- assuming that...

We examine the widespread SimonsVoss digital locking system 3060 G2 that relies on an undisclosed, proprietary protocol to mutually authenticate transponders and locks. For assessing the security of the system, several tasks have to be performed: By decapsulating the used microcontrollers with acid and circumventing their read-out protection with UV-C light, the complete program code and data contained in door lock and transponder are extracted. As a second major step, the multi-pass...

In this paper we propose new methods to blind exponents used in RSA and in elliptic curves based algorithms. Due to classical differential power analysis (DPA and CPA), a lot of countermeasures to protect exponents have been proposed since 1999 Kocher [20] and by Coron [13]. However, these blinding methods present some drawbacks regarding execution time and memory cost. It also got some weaknesses. Indeed they could also be targeted by some attacks such as The Carry Leakage on the Randomized...

We consider the problem of whether there exist non-trivial constant-round public-coin zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. To date, in spite of high interest in the above, there is no definite answer to the question. We focus on the type of ZK proofs that admit a universal simulator (which handles all malicious verifiers), and show a connection between the existence of such proof systems and a seemingly unrelated “program understanding” problem: for a natural class of constant-round public-coin ZK...

DECT is a standard for cordless phones. The intent of this thesis is to evaluate DECT security in a comprehensive way. To secure conversations over the air, DECT uses two proprietary algorithms, namely the DECT Standard Authentication Algorithm (DSAA) for authentication and key derivation, and the DECT Standard Cipher (DSC) for encryption. Both algorithms have been kept secret and were only available to DECT device manufacturers under a None Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The reader is first...

This paper is a short summary of a real world AES key extraction performed on a military grade FPGA marketed as 'virtually unbreakable' and 'highly secure'. We demonstrated that it is possible to extract the AES key from the Actel/Microsemi ProASIC3 chip in a time of 0.01 seconds using a new side-channel analysis technique called Pipeline Emission Analysis (PEA). This new technique does not introduce a new form of side-channel attacks (SCA), it introduces a substantially improved method of...

While communication infrastructures rapidly intertwine with our daily lives, public understanding of underlying technologies and privacy implications is often limited by their closed-source nature. Lacking the funding and resources of corporations and the intelligence community, developing and expanding this understanding is a sometimes tedious, but nonetheless important process. In this sense, we document how we have decrypted our own communication in the Thuraya satellite network. We have...

Shape-memory alloys are metal pieces that "remember" their original cold-forged shapes and return to the pre-deformed shape after heating. In this work we construct a software analogous of shape-memory alloys: programs whose code resists obfuscation. We show how to pour arbitrary functions into protective envelops that allow recovering the functions' {\sl exact initial code} after obfuscation. We explicit the theoretical foundations of our method and provide a concrete implementation in Scheme.

The cryptographic algorithm called INCrypt32 is a MAC algorithm to authenticate participants, RFID cards and readers, in HID Global's iCLASS systems. HID's iCLASS cards are widely used contactless smart cards for physical access control. Although INCrypt32 is a heart of the security of HID's iCLASS systems, its security has not been evaluated yet since the specication has not been open to public. In this paper, we reveal the specication of INCrypt32 by reverse engineering an iCLASS card and...

This paper is a short summary of our real-world side-channel analysis of the bitstream encryption mechanism provided by Xilinx FPGAs. This work covers our results analyzing the Virtex 4, Virtex 5, and Spartan 6 family showing that the encryption mechanism can be completely broken with moderate effort. The presented results provide an overview of a practical real-world analysis and should help practitioners to judge the necessity to implement side-channel countermeasures. We demonstrate...

Over the last two decades FPGAs have become central components for many advanced digital systems, e.g., video signal processing, network routers, data acquisition and military systems. In order to protect the intellectual property and to prevent fraud, e.g., by cloning an FPGA or manipulating its content, many current FPGAs employ a bitstream encryption feature. We develop a successful attack on the bitstream encryption engine integrated in the widespread Virtex-II Pro FPGAs from Xilinx,...

Protecting an implementation against Side Channel Analysis for Reverse Engineering (SCARE) attacks is a great challenge and we address this challenge by presenting a first proof of concept. White-box cryptography has been developed to protect programs against an adversary who has full access to their software implementation. It has also been suggested as a countermeasure against side channel attacks and we examine here these techniques in the wider perspective of SCARE. We consider that the...

MiFare Classic is the most popular contactless smart card with about 200 millions copies in circulation worldwide. At Esorics 2008 Dutch researchers showed that the underlying cipher Crypto-1 can be cracked in as little as 0.1 seconds if the attacker can access or eavesdrop the RF communications with the (genuine) reader. We discovered that a MiFare classic card can be cloned in a much more practical card-only scenario, where the attacker only needs to be in the proximity of the card for a...

MiFare Crypto 1 is a lightweight stream cipher used in London's Oyster card, Netherland's OV-Chipcard, US Boston's CharlieCard, and in numerous wireless access control and ticketing systems worldwide. Recently, researchers have been able to recover this algorithm by reverse engineering. We have examined MiFare from the point of view of the so called "algebraic attacks". We can recover the full 48-bit key of MiFare algorithm in 200 seconds on a PC, given 1 known IV (from one single...

Linux is the most popular open source project. The Linux random number generator is part of the kernel of all Linux distributions and is based on generating randomness from entropy of operating system events. The output of this generator is used for almost every security protocol, including TLS/SSL key generation, choosing TCP sequence numbers, and file system and email encryption. Although the generator is part of an open source project, its source code (about $2500$ lines of code) is...

Side-channel analysis has been recognized for several years as a practical and powerful means to reveal secret keys of [publicly known] cryptographic algorithms. Only very recently this kind of cryptanalysis has been applied to reverse engineer a non-trivial part of the specification of a proprietary (i.e., secret) algorithm. The target here is no longer the value of secret key but the secret specifications of the cryptographic algorithm itself. In a recent paper, Roman Novak (2003)...