Abstract
We complete the state-of-the-art on the side-channel security of real-world devices by analysing two 32-bit microcontrollers equipped with an unprotected co-processor. Our results show that (i) the lack of understanding of their hardware architecture can be circumvented with standard detection tools – for this purpose, we combine a simple variation of the Test Vector Leakage Assessment methodology with Signal-to-Noise Ratio estimations, which enables the efficient identification of attack vectors; (ii) standard distinguishers then lead to powerful key recoveries with less than 5,000 traces; and (iii) preprocessing like the continuous wavelet transform can be useful in such a black box evaluation context.
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Notes
- 1.
Concretely, we only evaluate Eq. 6 at a finite number of coordinates since exploring the entire continuous domain is unpractical.
- 2.
This number corresponds to the AES core and excludes data loadings.
- 3.
For CPA attacks, as they do not output probabilities but correlation scores, the rank estimation algorithm is not optimal and may not represent the worst-case [8]. We then use it as a heuristic bound on the security level of our targets.
- 4.
We are aware of two independent teams who observed similar results.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Colin O’Flynn for useful feedback about the paper. François-Xavier Standaert is a Senior Research Associate of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS-F.R.S.). Work funded in parts by the European Union through the ERC project SWORD (724725) and the European Union & Walloon Region FEDER USERMedia project 501907379156.
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Udvarhelyi, B., van Wassenhove, A., Bronchain, O., Standaert, FX. (2021). On the Security of Off-the-Shelf Microcontrollers: Hardware Is Not Enough. In: Liardet, PY., Mentens, N. (eds) Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications. CARDIS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12609. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68487-7_7
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