Workshop
Introduction to Hardware (In)security with the Chip Whisperer-Nano
Nathan Jones
02:00:53
It's well known that network-connected systems need to secure themselves against remote attackers. But what could a person do with a device if they could actually hold it in their hands? A lot, it turns out!
Join me in this workshop as we discuss the many ways an electronic device could become compromised by a knowledgeable person with physical access to a device.
Participants will then use a ChipWhisperer - Nano (or simulated data from one) to conduct:
- a differential power analysis (DPA) attack to recover the private key of a device performing AES128 encryption and
- a voltage fault injection attack to bypass the password login in a UART shell.
To complete the workshop, participants will need
- a ChipWhisperer-Nano (available from Mouser [Mouser #: 343-NAE-CWNANO]) or
- simulated data (provided by the instructor).
To save time during the workshop, participants can navigate to chipwhisperer.readthedocs.io to ensure they've downloaded the necessary software, following the download instructions for either their OS or for VirtualBox.
Someone at the very end asked about the prevalence of IC decapping in industrial espionage. I don't really know the answer to that question, but I do know that there are firms who will decap an IC for a few hundred dollars. That would make it seem pretty easy to do for a company that wanted it, but I guess the follow-on question is, "What do you plan to do with a decapped IC?" Decapping it may be cheap but the tools and know-how needed to do anything with that (laser fault injection, optical side-channel analysis, reverse engineering, reading bits out of memory, focused ion beam editing, etc) are very expensive.