MASc seminar - Masoumeh Dadjou

Monday, September 16, 2013 11:00 am - 11:00 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Speaker

Masoumeh Dadjou

Title

Analysis and Design of Clock-glitch Fault Injection within a FPGA

Abstract

In modern cryptanalysis, an active attacker may induce errors during the computation of a cryptographic algorithm and exploit the faulty results to extract information about the secret key in embedded systems. This kind of attack is called a fault attack. There have been various attack mechanisms with different fault models proposed in the literature. Among them, clock glitch faults support practically dangerous fault attacks on cryptosystems. This thesis presents a FPGA-based practical testbed for characterizing exploitable clock glitch faults and uniformly evaluating cryptographic systems against them. Concentrating on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), simulation and experimental results illustrates proper features for the clock glitches generated by the implemented on-chip glitch generator. These glitches can be injected reliably with acceptably accurate timing. The produced faults are random but their effect domain is finely controllable by the attacker. These features makes clock glitch faults practically suitable for future possible complete fault attacks on AES. This research is important for investigating the viability and analysis of fault injections on various cryptographic functions in future embedded systems.

Supervisor

Catherine Gebotys