Alejandro Cabrera Aldaya

Arttu Paju, Alejandro Cabrera Aldaya, Nicola Tuveri et al.

Entropy--a measure of randomness--is compulsory for the generation of secure cryptographic keys; however, Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are small or constrained often struggle to collect suf ficient entropy. In this article, we solve the entropy provisioning problem for a fleet of IoT devices that can generate a limited amount of entropy. We employ a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based on RISC-V to create an external entropy service for a fleet of IoT devices. A small measure of true entropy or pre-installed keys can establish initial secure communication. Once connected, devices can request cryptographically strong entropy from a TEE-backed server. RISC-V offers True Random Number Generators (TRNGs) and a TEE for devices to attest that they are receiving reliable entropy. In addition, this solution can be expanded by adding IoT devices with sensors that produce high-quality entropy as additional entropy sources for the RISC-V entropy provider. Our open-source implementation shows that building trusted entropy infrastructure for IoT is both feasible and effective on open RISC-V platforms.

Alejandro Cabrera Aldaya, Billy Bob Brumley

Performance degradation techniques are an important complement to side-channel attacks. In this work, we propose HyperDegrade -- a combination of previous approaches and the use of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) architectures. In addition to the new technique, we investigate the root causes of performance degradation using cache eviction, discovering a previously unknown slowdown origin. The slowdown produced is significantly higher than previous approaches, which translates into an increased time granularity for Flush+Reload attacks. We evaluate HyperDegrade on different Intel microarchitectures, yielding significant slowdowns that achieve, in select microbenchmark cases, three orders of magnitude improvement over state-of-the-art. To evaluate the efficacy of performance degradation in side-channel amplification, we propose and evaluate leakage assessment metrics. The results evidence that HyperDegrade increases time granularity without a meaningful impact on trace quality. Additionally, we designed a fair experiment that compares three performance degradation strategies when coupled with Flush+Reload from an attacker perspective. We developed an attack on an unexploited vulnerability in OpenSSL in which HyperDegrade excels -- reducing by three times the number of required Flush+Reload traces to succeed. Regarding cryptography contributions, we revisit the recently proposed Raccoon attack on TLS-DH key exchanges, demonstrating its application to other protocols. Using HyperDegrade, we developed an end-to-end attack that shows how a Raccoon-like attack can succeed with real data, filling a missing gap from previous research.

Sohaib ul Hassan, Iaroslav Gridin, Ignacio M. Delgado-Lozano et al.

Recent work on Side Channel Analysis (SCA) targets old, well-known vulnerabilities, even previously exploited, reported, and patched in high-profile cryptography libraries. Nevertheless, researchers continue to find and exploit the same vulnerabilities in old and new products, highlighting a big issue among vendors: effectively tracking and fixing security vulnerabilities when disclosure is not done directly to them. In this work, we present another instance of this issue by performing the first library-wide SCA security evaluation of Mozilla's NSS security library. We use a combination of two independently-developed SCA security frameworks to identify and test security vulnerabilities. Our evaluation uncovers several new vulnerabilities in NSS affecting DSA, ECDSA, and RSA cryptosystems. We exploit said vulnerabilities and implement key recovery attacks using signals---extracted through different techniques such as timing, microarchitecture, and EM---and improved lattice methods.

Alejandro Cabrera Aldaya, Billy Bob Brumley

An online template attack (OTA) is a powerful technique previously used to attack elliptic curve scalar multiplication algorithms. This attack has only been analyzed in the realm of power consumption and EM side channels, where the signals leak related to the value being processed. However, microarchitecture signals have no such feature, invalidating some assumptions from previous OTA works. In this paper, we revisit previous OTA descriptions, proposing a generic framework and evaluation metrics for any side-channel signal. Our analysis reveals OTA features not previously considered, increasing its application scenarios and requiring a fresh countermeasure analysis to prevent it. In this regard, we demonstrate that OTAs can work in the backward direction, allowing to mount an augmented projective coordinates attack with respect to the proposal by Naccache, Smart and Stern (Eurocrypt 2004). This demonstrates that randomizing the initial targeted algorithm state does not prevent the attack as believed in previous works. We analyze three libraries libgcrypt, mbedTLS, and wolfSSL using two microarchitecture side channels. For the libgcrypt case, we target its EdDSA implementation using Curve25519 twist curve. We obtain similar results for mbedTLS and wolfSSL with curve secp256r1. For each library, we execute extensive attack instances that are able to recover the complete scalar in all cases using a single trace. This work demonstrates that microarchitecture online template attacks are also very powerful in this scenario, recovering secret information without knowing a leakage model. This highlights the importance of developing secure-by-default implementations, instead of fix-on-demand ones.

Cesar Pereida García, Sohaib ul Hassan, Nicola Tuveri et al.

We demonstrate that the format in which private keys are persisted impacts Side Channel Analysis (SCA) security. Surveying several widely deployed software libraries, we investigate the formats they support, how they parse these keys, and what runtime decisions they make. We uncover a combination of weaknesses and vulnerabilities, in extreme cases inducing completely disjoint multi-precision arithmetic stacks deep within the cryptosystem level for keys that otherwise seem logically equivalent. Exploiting these vulnerabilities, we design and implement key recovery attacks utilizing signals ranging from electromagnetic (EM) emanations, to granular microarchitecture cache timings, to coarse traditional wall clock timings.