Building Secure Systems

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Do curso por University of Maryland, College Park

Segurança de Hardware

248 classificações

University of Maryland, College Park

Segurança de Hardware

248 classificações

Curso 4 de 5 em Specialization Cybersecurity

In this course, we will study security and trust from the hardware perspective. Upon completing the course, students will understand the vulnerabilities in current digital system design flow and the physical attacks to these systems. They will learn that security starts from hardware design and be familiar with the tools and skills to build secure and trusted hardware.

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Physical Attacks and Modular Exponentiation

This week you will learn the fundamentals about physical attacks: what are physical attacks, who are the attackers, what are their motivations, how can they attack your system (from hardware), what kind of skills/tools/equipment they should need to break your system, etc. You will also see what are the available countermeasures. You will learn how system security level and tamper resistance level are defined and some general guidelines on how to make your system secure by design. In the second part, you will learn a useful mathematical operation called modular exponentiation. It is widely used in modern cryptography but it is very computational expensive. You will see how security vulnerability might be introduced during the implementation of this operation and thus make the mathematically sound cryptographic primitives breakable. This will also be important for you to learn side channel attack next week.

Physical Attacks (PA) Basics14:32

Physical Attacks and Countermeasures 13:55

Building Secure Systems 10:25

Modular Exponentiation (ME) Basics 6:15

ME in Cryptography8:54

ME Implementation and Vulnerability14:25

Montgomery Reduction11:51

Conheça os instrutores

Gang Qu
Associate Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering

After learning of physical attacks, and some counter measures,

we discuss how temporary resistance levels are evaluated and

also how to build an enhanced system security.

The tamper resistance level or

system security level have always been measured by the time,

cost and the knowledge that the attacker has to have to break the system.

From high to low a device tamper resistance can be

put into six different levels.

The lowest level is zero, where the attacker does

not need any special equipment or tools to break the system.

The attacker can be done in minutes or a couple of hours.

These systems do not have any security features and

all of their components are open.

Examples include microcontrollers or FPGA chips with external memory.

And the second lowest level is called low.

This systems has some basic security features that are easy to break.

The microcontroller with internal memory and proprietary programming algorithms,

but no security mechanisms to protect the memory fall into this, this category.

The attacker does need some basic equipment and

tools to break these systems.

It may take them several hours or a couple of days.

The cost was under $1,000 in the original 1991 document.

But the price of the equipment keeps on dropping.

And nowadays an attacker can obtain all

the necessary equipments with probably less of $500.

The next level is called moderate low.

These other systems that have security features designed against the low

cost attacks.

It will take more expensive equipment and longer time to break the security.

System in the moderate temporary resist,

resistance level normally are protected against most of the common attacks,

special tools, skills, and the knowledge are needed to break such systems.

Rather expensive equipment is also required.

The time to break the systems can be several months.

Finally, systems designed for security applications such as military chips,

banking systems, complex ASIC and

FPGAs with high or moderate high level of temporary resistance.

They are supposed to be secure against all the known attacks.

It is normally impossible or

extremely difficult for any individual to break these systems.

Sometimes, new attack models or

new tools have to be invented to break these systems.

As we have already seen, the cost for

attacks drops as the price of equipment and the tools goes down.

So the classification of these levels are relative.

Some device with moderate to high tamper protection levels may one day

become slow level low while a new low cost attack is found.

Also technology advances such as the use of new materials with a new design

process will increase the tamper resistance level of certain devices.

The US Department of Commerce has also published its standards of

how secure a crypto module is implemented.

Level one is the lowest level.

It must specify the basic security requirements for the crypto module.

Level two improves level one by adding physical

security mechanisms such as coating, seals or locks.

Level three requires more advanced physical security to keep

attackers away from critical security parameters in the crypto modules.

Level four is the highest security level.

It should ensure the security of the crypto module against all

kinds of physical attacks.

Here are some examples of the security failures.

Your microchip PIC microcontroller, a security fuse bug is found,

was found, where the security fuse could not be reset,

could be reset without erasing the code or data.

And this has been fixed in newer devices.

In Hitachi smartcards, the information leak on a product CD was reported.

Where the full data sheet about the smartcard is accidentally included

in the CD.

Actel secure FPGA chip, a programming software bug was, was reported.

Of such chip, devices were always programmed with a specific passkey.

A software update can fix the problem.

Also a programming software bug was found on Xilinx secure CPLD.

The security fuses is incorrectly programmed, and

they need a software update to fix the problem.

Finally, in the Dallas SHA-1 secure memory,

a factory initialization bug was reported.

Some security features were not activated and

it failed to provide the required protection.

It ends up that batch of chips were all record, recalled.

From this set of slides, we have learned that there are different types of

attackers and the different ways to attack a system.

Before you build your secure system, you have to

ask yourself what will be the motivations for others to attack my system.

Who might be the attackers, and how would they attack my system?

More specifically, building a secure system start with understanding

the attackers and to perform, a system security evaluation and threat estimation.

You need to take into account the attacker's motivation to attack,

the tools, equipment, skills, time, and money they need to break the system.

And also, the probability they can be successful.

A rule of thumb is that if the cost that they have to pay to

break the system is higher than the benefit they can get,

then a rational attacker will not attack, attempt to break the system.

Once you find the weakest security link in your system and decided,

decided to improve it, you may find that there are too many products on the market.

Most of them, claim to be secure or

with a security, sec, certific, cert, certification.

However, claims and certification are not guarantees.

In many cases, there's no security benchmark, and

the attackers will always keep on bringing new and a powerful attacks.

So we cannot test the system against all the possible

scenarios to verify its security.

Even worse, it may not make much sense to compare

the security features of components from different vendors.

Cheap manufacturers, they know more about the security of their products.

However, they will only ad, advertise the good features.

Just like most of the sales persons like car dealers and realtors will do.

Good luck if you trust 'em.

So you may find that sometimes you have to redesign for

security and the trust of the system.

This is clearly not what you want because of the cost of redesign.

Particularly when you face the pressure of released deadlines.

That is one of the reasons we have seen, and

will continue to see, many products with defect on the market.

In the worst case, when, when recall have to be made,

and the cost of recall may be higher than redesign.

This brings us to the conclusion that

building secure system needs a sys, system engineer approach.

And you have to build security and the trust into the system,

not onto an already built system by adding security features.

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