Design and Verification of Side-Channel and Fault Attacks Countermeasures

In recent years, several kinds of attacks on cryptographic devices have been developed. The goal of these attacks is to reveal secret keys generated by these devices. The most common attacks in hardware are power analysis attacks, particularly the Differential Power Analysis. These kind of attacks are non-invasive attacks, also referred to as side-channel attacks. DPA is a technique that involves directly interpreting power consumption measurements collected during cryptographic operations. In addition to these attacks, it is possible to enhance them by injecting faults in the device. These attacks are known as active attacks. Their goal is to insert a fault in a device without depackaging it. Faults can be inducted by clock glitches, power glitches or by changing the temperature of the environment. Several countermeasures have been proposed for DPA attacks. This thesis will be based on the technique of the Threshold Implementations, which is a masking scheme based on multiparty computation and secret sharing. The aim of the thesis is to find a design that provides protection to these active attacks. Firstly, all the possible fault attacks will be studied, in order to understand their impact in the security of the circuit and how they work. Next, the existing methods will be applied to seek protection against these attacks and see their strengths and limitations. The starting points will be fault-tolerant computing and threshold secret-sharing schemes. Finally, new or complement techniques will be developed to cover possibles lacks of protection.status: publishe