A Brief Survey of Physical Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware

Previously, the topic of side-channel attacks (SCA) was covered on this blog. These attacks are very popular, for they can be mounted using very cheap equipment and do not necessarily require high level of expertise. Hence, SCA are widely accessible and present a common danger. As a result, they are well researched, and various countermeasures have been developed. Still, they are just a small part of the stack of physical attacks. Figure 1. crudely depicts the this colorful “stack”. The one thing all physical attacks have in common is that it is assumed that the attacker must gain physical access to the target device, and attain it for a certain amount of time. In the remainder of this post, a brief survey of these attacks will be given. More detailed descriptions will be provided in a series of posts that will follow. 

Figure 1: Stack of Physical Attacks

Invasiveness

The first segregation is based on the “invasiveness”. Invasive attacks entail breach of target’s packaging, or its surrounding enclosure. This is often a very delicate process which often requires expensive equipment and a high level of expertise. Since the breach is destructive by nature, it can be easily detected by subsequent users — if the chip itself was not destroyed in the process that is. The goal of this breach is to gain access to internal state of a chip. Commonly attackers target on-chip busses or storage elements, which may contain sensitive intermediaries of cryptographic computations or keys themselves. Aforementioned enclosures are a privilege of expensive devices, often called Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). HSMs may cost tens of thousands of Euros, and are envisioned to provide secure computational environments at high speeds. Apart from restricting access to the chip using sturdy build and “tamper-proof” latches and locks, enclosures are frequently equipped with seals and coatings that are supposed to witness any foul play that may have taken place. Additionally, tamper detection measures may be built in, envisioned to void all sensitive information at the first glimpse of attacker’s activities. Hence, invading these juggernauts is commonly more expensive and time consuming. Unfortunately, market-share of HSMs compared to bare smart-cards and RFIDs is neighboring negligible, especially with the rise of the IoT.

On the contrary, non-invasive adversaries do not cause any structural damage to packaging nor enclosures. They interact with the target device using its existing interfaces, and mediums that require no mechanical interaction with the device. They are virtually free, but may require significant expertise of attackers.

Activeness

The second segregation is based on the “activeness” of the attacker. Active attacks entail induction of computational (logical) or structural changes in the target chip. When we talk about computational changes, a very common example are Fault Injection (FI) attacks. There are two phases to FI attacks: fault injection during the execution of the targeted algorithm, and the analysis based on the observations of faulty outputs. A common method for altering device’s execution is called clock glitching. Namely, by introducing a premature edge on the clock signal, attacker violates devices’s critical path. As a result, incorrect values are captured in device’s registers. Alternatively, faults can be induced by shooting a laser beam with enough power to change the state of the device, while allowing it to remain operational. Here, any data or control register fall under “state of the device”. For example, round counter, commonly used in implementations of block ciphers, is a very favored target for such faults. Active attacks may require higher level of technical skill, and a more sophisticated setup.

On the contrary, passive adversaries may only observe device’s execution, while interacting through its predefined interfaces. Well-known SCA fall under this category. These attacks are well researched, and can be mounted using very cheap equipment. Developed techniques (e.g., Mutual Information Analysis) are extremely powerful, and once incorporated in the attackers setup can be reproduced quite trivially. Consequently, although they entail only limited exposure of the device, they pose a serious threat for they are very accessible even to attackers with modest capabilities.

The Reality

Activeness and invasiveness are two orthogonal properties, resulting in a total of four possibilities (although I find that the existence of “invasive and passive attacks” calls for a philosophical debate). Unfortunately, situation is much more complex than that in practice. Firstly, attackers are likely to use combined attacks. For example, FI + SCA may be a very powerful combination. Additionally, the distinction mentioned above is not as binary. Rather, along each of the two orthogonal axes there are many shades. For example, faults can be injected in some chips by applying laser beams to their packaging (non-invasive), while others may be shielded from such beams (hence they have to be attacked invasively).

Consequently, there exists a myriad of possible attack variations. Moreover, even if we lock on a certain extreme — let us say passive, non-invasive, CPA — quality of the measurement setup plays a very significant role. A 500 Euro oscilloscope can hardly match its 30000 Euro counterpart. In hindsight, there are no upper bounds to the power of a skilled invasive attacker performing a battery of active and passive attacks, apart from the temporal and financial constraints.

Taking all above into account, choosing a set of countermeasures is a difficult task (let alone implementing them properly). Bare in mind that these countermeasures are not for free. They may significantly increase the price of devices, reducing the profit margins severely. Therefore, there are no silver bullets in protection against physical attacks. In other words, in practice security engineers work to demotivate attackers with high probability. They try to stop “the attacker of interest”, rather then stopping all attacks. To achieve this, first step is identifying potential attackers. This process is often called profiling, and in a nutshell I would describe it as follows. Please note that this is a gross simplification of the problem, meant to depict the general idea. No distinction is made between fixed (price of the setup) and recurring (every time the attack is mounted) costs, nor between temporal and financial costs. Lastly, please note that the value of assets is heavily simplified as well, for the sake of avoiding a philosophical discussion yet again.

Manufacturer’s Dilemma

Assume that a device D, which costs d to manufacture, protects assets worth x , and features a
countermeasure C that costs c to deploy. We may consider D to be secure against an attacker A, who can mount a successful attack at a cost a (which includes A’s investment in
development of expertise), as long as

x ≤a+μA,

μA being the attackers profit margin. In other words, if the cost a is high enough attacker can not obtain desired amount of profit for given assets. On the other hand a manufacturer M that produces D wants to sell for a price m such that

m ≥ d + c + μM,

μ M being M’s profit margin. In other words, price of deploying countermeasures c directly cuts into manufacturer’s profits. Looking at these inequalities, it seems that there is no dilemma at all. Nevertheless, cost of attack depends on the selection of a countermeasure, i.e.,

a =f(c).

Assuming that an increase in c leads to the increase in a , by applying some high school math (readers are welcome to play with it), we see that the selection of C must be performed based on the value of assets it protects. A more detailed discussion on this topic will be given in one of the following posts.
In conclusion, physical attacks are a great threat. As IoT progresses, and the amount of ubiquitous devices increases their potential impact may only grow. Deploying devices that protect assets against physical attacks is a complex problem, which demands bespoke solutions, tailored to individual use cases.