Automatic Extraction of Secrets from the Transistor Jungle using Laser-Assisted Side-Channel Attacks
This work addresses a critical security vulnerability for hardware vendors and users by demonstrating that physical complexity is not a sufficient barrier against automated attacks.
The paper tackles the problem of extracting secret keys from secure hardware without knowledge of the chip layout by automating reverse engineering using laser-assisted side-channel attacks, achieving successful key extraction on three different hardware platforms.
The security of modern electronic devices relies on secret keys stored on secure hardware modules as the root-of-trust (RoT). Extracting those keys would break the security of the entire system. As shown before, sophisticated side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks, using chip failure analysis (FA) techniques, can extract data from on-chip memory cells. However, since the chip's layout is unknown to the adversary in practice, secret key localization and reverse engineering are onerous tasks. Consequently, hardware vendors commonly believe that the ever-growing physical complexity of the integrated circuit (IC) designs can be a natural barrier against potential adversaries. In this work, we present a novel approach that can extract the secret key without any knowledge of the IC's layout, and independent from the employed memory technology as key storage. We automate the -- traditionally very labor-intensive -- reverse engineering and data extraction process. To that end, we demonstrate that black-box measurements captured using laser-assisted SCA techniques from a training device with known key can be used to profile the device for a later key prediction on other victim devices with unknown keys. To showcase the potential of our approach, we target keys on three different hardware platforms, which are utilized as RoT in different products.