Abstract
By shrinking the technology and reducing the energy requirements of integrated circuits, producing ultra-low-power devices has practically become possible. Texas Instruments as a pioneer in developing FRAM-based products announced a couple of different microcontroller (MCU) families based on the low-power and fast Ferroelectric RAM technology. Such MCUs come with embedded cryptographic module(s) as well as the assertion that – due to the underlying ultra-low-power technology – mounting successful side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks has become very difficult. In this work we practically evaluate this claimed hardness by means of state-of-the-art power analysis attacks. The leakage sources and corresponding attacks are presented in order to give an overview on the potential risks of making use of such platforms in security-related applications. In short, we partially confirm the given assertion. Some modules, e.g., the embedded cryptographic accelerator, can still be attacked but with slightly immoderate effort. On the contrary, the other leakage sources are easily exploitable leading to straightforward attacks being able to recover the secrets.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Balasch, J., Gierlichs, B., Verdult, R., Batina, L., Verbauwhede, I.: Power analysis of Atmel CryptoMemory – recovering keys from secure EEPROMs. In: Dunkelman, O. (ed.) CT-RSA 2012. LNCS, vol. 7178, pp. 19–34. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Bilgin, B., Gierlichs, B., Nikova, S., Nikov, V., Rijmen, V.: Higher-order threshold implementations. In: Sarkar, P., Iwata, T. (eds.) ASIACRYPT 2014, Part II. LNCS, vol. 8874, pp. 326–343. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Brier, E., Clavier, C., Olivier, F.: Correlation power analysis with a leakage model. In: Joye, M., Quisquater, J.-J. (eds.) CHES 2004. LNCS, vol. 3156, pp. 16–29. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Eisenbarth, T., Kasper, T., Moradi, A., Paar, C., Salmasizadeh, M., Shalmani, M.T.M.: On the power of power analysis in the real world: a complete break of the KeeLoq code hopping scheme. In: Wagner, D. (ed.) CRYPTO 2008. LNCS, vol. 5157, pp. 203–220. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Goodwill, G., Jun, B., Jaffe, J., Rohatgi, P.: A testing methodology for side-channel resistance validation. In: NIST Non-Invasive Attack Testing Workshop, Nara (2011)
Guo, J., Peyrin, T., Poschmann, A., Robshaw, M.: The LED Block Cipher. In: Preneel, B., Takagi, T. (eds.) CHES 2011. LNCS, vol. 6917, pp. 326–341. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Kerckhof, S., Standaert, F.-X., Peeters, E.: From new technologies to new solutions exploiting FRAM memories to enhance physical security. In: Francillon, A., Rohatgi, P. (eds.) CARDIS 2013. LNCS, vol. 8419, pp. 16–30. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Kizhvatov, I.: Side channel analysis of AVR XMEGA crypto engine. In: WESS 2009. ACM (2009)
Kocher, P.C., Jaffe, J., Jun, B.: Differential power analysis. In: Wiener, M. (ed.) CRYPTO 1999. LNCS, vol. 1666, pp. 388–397. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Microsemi. Security: Protect Your Intellectual Property. http://www.microsemi.com/products/fpga-soc/security
Moradi, A., Barenghi, A., Kasper, T., Paar, C.: On the vulnerability of FPGA bitstream encryption against power analysis attacks: extracting keys from xilinx Virtex-II FPGAs. In: CCS 2011, pp. 111–124. ACM (2011)
Moradi, A., Oswald, D., Paar, C., Swierczynski, P.: Side-channel attacks on the bitstream encryption mechanism of Altera Stratix II: facilitating black-box analysis using software reverse-engineering. In: FPGA 2013, pp. 91–100. ACM (2013)
Oswald, D., Paar, C.: Breaking mifare DESFire MF3ICD40: power analysis and templates in the real world. In: Preneel, B., Takagi, T. (eds.) CHES 2011. LNCS, vol. 6917, pp. 207–222. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Standaert, F.-X., Petit, C., Veyrat-Charvillon, N.: Masking with randomized look up tables. In: Naccache, D. (ed.) Cryphtography and Security: From Theory to Applications. LNCS, vol. 6805, pp. 283–299. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Texas Instruments. Introducing advanced security to low-power applications with FRAM-based MCUs (2012). www.ebv.com/fileadmin/design_solutions/php/download.php?path=uploads%2Ftx_highlightcampaign%2FWolverine_Security_Whitepaper_01.pdf
Texas Instruments. Embedded Processing & DSP Resource Guide (2014). http://www.ti.com.cn/cn/lit/sg/sprt285f/sprt285f.pdf
Texas Instruments. User’s Guide: MSP430FR58xx, MSP430FR59xx, MSP430FR68xx, and MSP430FR69xx Family (2014). http://www.ti.com.cn/cn/lit/ug/slau367f/slau367f.pdf
Xilinx. UltraScale Architecture. http://www.xilinx.com/products/technology/ultrascale.html
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Stéphanie Kerckhof and François-Xavier Standaert from Université catholique de Louvain for their kindness in providing the source code of the masked implementation of the reduced LED of [7].
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Moradi, A., Hinterwälder, G. (2015). Side-Channel Security Analysis of Ultra-Low-Power FRAM-Based MCUs. In: Mangard, S., Poschmann, A. (eds) Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design. COSADE 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9064. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21476-4_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21476-4_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-21475-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-21476-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)