This work presents a novel low-cost optoelectronic setup for time- and spatially resolved analysis of photonic emissions and a corresponding methodology, Simple Photonic Emission Analysis (SPEA). Observing the backside of ICs, the system captures extremly weak photo-emissions from switching transistors and relates them to code running in the chip. SPEA utilizes both spatial and temporal information about these emissions to perform side channel analysis of ICs. We successfully performed SPEA of a proof-of-concept AES implementation and were able to recover the full AES secret key by monitoring accesses to the S-Box. This attack directly exploits the side channel leakage of a single transistor and requires no additional data processing. The system costs and the necessary time for an attack are comparable to power analysis techniques. The presented approach significantly reduces the amount of effort required to perform attacks based on photonic emission analysis and allows AES key recovery in a relevant amount of time. We present practical results for the AVR ATMega328P and the AVR XMega128A1.

Simple photonic emission analysis of AES

This work presents a novel low-cost optoelectronic setup for time- and spatially resolved analysis of photonic emissions and a corresponding methodology, Simple Photonic Emission Analysis (SPEA) Observing the backside of ICs, the system captures extremly weak photoemissions from switching transistors and relates them to program running in the chip SPEA utilizes both spatial and temporal information about these emissions to perform side channel analysis of ICs We successfully performed SPEA of a proof-of-concept AES implementation and were able to recover the full AES secret key by monitoring accesses to the S-Box This attack directly exploits the side channel leakage of a single transistor and requires no additional data processing The system costs and the necessary time for an attack are comparable to power analysis techniques The presented approach significantly reduces the amount of effort required to perform attacks based on photonic emission analysis and allows AES key recovery in a relevant amount of time

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Simple photonic emission analysis of AES: photonic side channel analysis for the rest of us

Integrated circuits (ICs) are the foundation of all computing systems. They comprise high-value hardware intellectual property (IP) that are at risk of piracy, reverse-engineering, and modifications while making their way through the geographically-distributed IC supply chain. On the frontier of hardware security are various design-for-trust techniques that claim to protect designs from untrusted entities across the design flow. Logic locking is one technique that promises protection from the gamut of threats in IC manufacturing. In this work, we perform a critical review of logic locking techniques in the literature, and expose several shortcomings. Taking inspiration from other cybersecurity competitions, we devise a community-led benchmarking exercise to address the evaluation deficiencies. In reflecting on this process, we shed new light on deficiencies in evaluation of logic locking and reveal important future directions. The lessons learned can guide future endeavors in other areas of hardware security.

Benchmarking at the Frontier of Hardware Security: Lessons from Logic Locking.

This paper describes the first attack utilizing the photonic side channel against a public-key crypto-system. We evaluated three common implementations of RSA modular exponentiation, all using the Karatsuba multiplication method. We discovered that the key length had marginal impact on resilience to the attack: attacking a 2048-bit key required only 9% more decryption attempts than a 1024-bit key. We found that the most dominant parameter impacting the attacker's effort is the minimal block size at which the Karatsuba method reverts to naive multiplication: even for parameter values as low as 32 or 64 bits our attacks achieve 100% success rate with under 10,000 decryption operations. Somewhat surprisingly, we discovered that Montgomery's Ladder — commonly perceived as the most resilient of the three implementations to side-channel attacks — was actually the most susceptible: for 2048-bit keys, our attack reveals 100% of the secret key bits with as few as 4000 decryptions.

Photonic side channel attacks against RSA

Using time-resolved emission to measure electrical signals inside very-large-scale integration complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor circuits in a non-invasive fashion is a very powerful technique. However, node scaling and the related supply voltage reduction have created significant challenges. In this paper, we investigate the limits of established and prototype single photon detectors for future low voltage applications. In particular the performance of a state of the art InGaAs single photon avalanche photodiode and a superconducting single photon detector are reported and compared for low voltage applications using test vehicles fabricated in IBM 65 nm silicon on insulator technologies.

Single Photon Detectors for Ultra Low Voltage Time-Resolved Emission Measurements

In this paper, we describe an advanced optical diagnostic technique used for diagnosing the IBM z990 eServer microprocessor (Slegel et al., 2004). Time-to-market pressure demands quick diagnostic turnaround time and high diagnostic resolution while the ever increasing design complexity, density, cycle time, and shrinking technologies dramatically add difficulties to diagnostics. Although design-for-test (DFT) and design-for-diagnostics (DFD) features are implemented in the latest microprocessors to help easing the diagnostic efforts, they may still not be sufficient to diagnose certain fails. The well-known picosecond imaging circuit analysis (PICA) (Kash and Tsang, 1997) tool, equipped with the high quantum efficiency superconducting single-photon detector (SSPD,) shows a unique diagnostic capability for optically probing the internal nodes of a chip. Several hard-to-diagnose examples will be used to demonstrate the unique capabilities of this technique

H.J. Nam

Papers

An advanced optical diagnostic technique of IBM z990 eServer microprocessor