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GLOBAL CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEYS IN THE IOT WORLD AND THE THREATS THEY PRESENT

Mitigate the risk and protect your hardware against side-channel attacks on its secure element.

IoT cryptography frequently employs shared global keys due to the relatively low prices of IoT devices. Global keys, while economically pragmatic, make the devices inherently insecure: compromising only one device by means of a side-channel attack, which extracts the secret key, makes all identical devices vulnerable to hackers. Defending against these attacks is resource intensive. Of the various kinds of side-channel attacks, Differential Power Analysis (DPA) is the cheapest to deploy with potentially the highest amount of damage to the manufacturer. What can be done to protect IoT devices from such attacks?

Fortify’s AES security evaluation by SGS

“Summary. The leakage analysis (Welch t-test) on over 30 million traces did not show statistically significant first- and second-order differences between trace sets with fixed and random inputs. The template-based DPA analysis, on the pseudo-random trace set for the profiling phase (15 million traces) and on a sub-set of 300k fix input traces for matching phase targeting the first-round S-box output, and template attack on ciphertext, did not indicate any potential information leakage.”

” The results for the soft IP presented in the report were obtained on the TOE which is the basic hardware implementation of the soft IP without additional levels of security (e.g. that are present in a secure silicon layout). Therefore the internal strength of the soft IP itself was evaluated. This indicates that the investigated features and parameters of the soft IP implementation should be robust against SCA and fault injection attacks in different implementations including ASIC. Nevertheless, according to the Common Criteria rules, the strength of the final composite product must be evaluated on its own.”

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