Tools for Detection of Fault Vulnerabilities in Cryptographic Ciphers

When: Friday, June 23, 2017
Where: PGH 563
Time: 11:00 AM – Noon

Speaker: Prof. Chester Rebeiro, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

Host: Prof. Rakesh Verma

A major threat in modern crypto-systems is from information that leaks through unexpected channels such as the device's power consumption, its execution time, electro-magnetic radiation, and many others. This leakage, known as side-channel leakage, can break a strong cipher like the AES in a few minutes. Detecting these vulnerabilities at design time is not easy because side-channels are not bugs, errors, or program flaws. As a result many side-channel leaks are found only after deployment. In this talk we would provide an overview of side channel attacks on cryptographic ciphers. We then focus on one particular form of side-channel attack known as fault attacks. We present our framework called XFC that can detect fault attack vulnerabilities on block ciphers at design time.

Bio:

Chester Rebeiro is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Instituted of Technology, Madras. Prior to this he was a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University. He has a PhD from IIT Kharagpur in the area of hardware security. Before joining IIT Kharagpur for his PhD studies, he worked as a member technical staff at CDAC, Bangalore. His area of interests includes security aspect in the operating system, architecture, and VLSI. He is particularly interested in applying learning algorithms and formal methods to analyze the security of systems.