Chicken or the Egg - Computational Data Attacks or Physical Attacks

Side-channel and fault injection analyses are well-known domains that have been used for years to evaluate the resistance of hardware based products. These techniques remain a threat for the secret assets embedded in products like smart cards or System On Chip. But most of these products contain nowadays several strong protections rendering side-channel and fault attacks difficult or inefficient. For two decades embedded cryptography for payment, pay tv, identity areas have relied a lot on secure elements. Nowadays more alternative solutions on mobile phones appear with the aim to offer software-based security services including payment and security solutions as the HCE and DRM products. Cryptographic operations running in such applications are then executed most often on unprotected hardware devices. Therefore the binary code is often accessible to attackers who can use static and dynamic reverse engineering techniques to extract and analyse operations including data modification as faults. Hence, hiding or obfuscating secrets and/or whitebox cryptography becomes a strong alternatives to secure element storage for assets. We explain in this paper how directly from the binary or with the extracted source code we can perform statistical and fault analyses using similar techniques as those used in hardware-based security. This concerns particularly side-channel or fault injections techniques. Using our tool and virtualization technique, an attacker can emulate and trace and modify any chosen computational data (memory or register manipulation, any machine language operation) executed in the mobile application. It means the attacker is not no longer restricted by any physical limitations imposing a leakage model (and additional noise) or making fault injection tied with physical limitations. Hence statistical and fault attacks can go potentially further in software-based implementation compared to hardware based devices. As a consequence, complex techniques like high order, collision and horizontal statistical attacks become very efficient and can be easily performed on the computational data execution traces. A similar consequence applies for fault injection attacks. Hence the word statistical and fault analysis on computational data becomes more appropriate and one can wonder who has been the first between computational data or physical attack techniques? Chicken or the Egg