Session 7 > Hardware Security¶

Physical Attacks¶

Instructor: Vincent Ulitzsch

Physical vs remote access to a computer system
No need to be stealthy or fast…if physical access is available
Time and attack machine constraints are not limitations if you have the device to be broken in your possession
2 types of physical attacks:
- Side channel
- Fault Injection
Fault Injection
- Power cycling
- Shooting with laser to flip bits
- Physical attacks to disturb a chip’s computation
  - Cheap but poor locality Methods: temperature, voltage glitching (uController to control glitch), clock glitching¶
- Voltage glitch introduces timing errors > introduce a timing delay
- attack specific line of code, know that line’s timing and introduce the glitch at exactly at time
- Chip Whisperer…device to perform hardware attacks
- Temporal vs Spatial attacks
- “Hardware Wallet”
Side Channel
- power consumption of device depends on what is being calculated on the chip
- Looking at power spikes of ‘square and multiply’ operation of RSA encryption

Instructor: Jean-Jacques Quisquater