Side-channel attacks on embedded devices and smartcards

This project focuses on several aspects of side-channel attacks on embedded devices and smartcards, utilizing timing, power-analysis and other side-channels.

Implementations of elliptic curve cryptography make a significant amount of implementation choices which affects performance, security, and the applicability of some attacks. Thus, the project aims to create and analyze methods for reverse-engineering implementation details of implementations of elliptic curve cryptography on black-box devices using side-channel attacks.

Side-channel attacks and leakage assessment techniques produce large amounts of data that has to be processed using statistical methods, which are often slow. To allow for more effective processing this project aims to investigate the design and implementation of high-performance algorithms used in side-channel attacks and associated data-processing optionally using GPGPU methods.

The developed tools and algorithms will be released under an open-source license, as contributions to existing projects or as new projects themselves.

One of the developed tools is already available, in the form of the pyecsca toolkit: a python toolkit for side-channel analysis of elliptic curvecryptography. https://github.com/J08nY/pyecsca