ISPIA Distinguished Lecture: “Constructive and Destructive Aspects of Hardware Security for the Internet of Things”

We are in the midst of the evolution towards the Internet of Things. The IoT is formed by myriads of networked embedded systems. As part of this development, embedded security has become an increasingly important issue in a multitude of applications. Examples include the Stuxnet virus, which has allegedly delayed the Iranian nuclear program, killer applications in the consumer area like iTunes or Amazon’s Kindle (the business models of which rely heavily on IP protection) and even medical implants like pace makers and insulin pumps which needs protection against hackers. In this presentation I will talk about some of our research projects over the last few years which dealt with both the constructive and “penetration testing” aspect of embedded security applications. The first case study addresses a popular topic in the current crypto community, namely lightweight cryptography. PRESENT is one of the smallest known ciphers which can be realized with as few as 1000 gates. The cipher was designed for extremely cost and power constrained applications such as RFID tags which can be used, e.g., as a tool for anti-counterfeiting of medical drugs, or for other low-power applications. PRESENT was recently standardized as ISO/IEC 29192. As a “destructive” example of our research we will show how the security mechanism of widely used FPGA devices can be circumvented. These are reconfigurable hardware devices which are widely used in many embedded systems, ranging from set-top boxes to high-speed routers. We were able to extract AES and 3DES key from a single power-up of the reconfiguration process. Once the key has been recovered, an attacker can clone, reverse engineer and alter a presumably secure hardware design. In our second destructive example we consider hardware Trojans. Even though they have drawn considerable attention by industry and the scientific community, little is known about how Trojans might look, especially those that are particularly designed to avoid detection. In this talk we propose an extremely stealthy manipulation below the gate level. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by inserting Trojans into the digital post-processing of Intel’s cryptographically secure random number generator used in the Ivy Bridge processors. BIO: Christof Paar co-founded, with Cetin Koc, the CHES (Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems) conference. Christof’s research interests include efficient realizations of cryptography, hardware security, implementation attacks, penetration of real-world systems and cryptanalytical hardware. He also works on real-world applications of embedded security, e.g., in cars or consumer devices. Christof has over 150 peer-reviewed publications and is co-author of the textbook Understanding Cryptography (Springer, 2009). He has given invited talks at MIT, Yale, Stanford, IBM Labs and Intel. Christof is Fellow of the IEEE. He co-founded ESCRYPT Inc., a leading system provider for embedded security which was acquired by Bosch. VIEW POSTER: http://www.ispia.ca/sites/default/files/Paar-DLS-Poster-DEC-2015v1.pdf

Location:

Biological Sciences Bldg Room 587

Speaker:

Christof Paar, Chair for Embedded Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and research professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/ispia-distinguished-lecture-constructive-and-destructive-aspects-hardware-security-internet