Physical and Advanced Side-Channel Attacks

On the hardware side, we will mount power analysis attacks on the cryptographic algorithms RSA and AES. We will see that simple power analysis attacks and differential power analysis attacks are powerful enough to obtain fine-grained information such as cryptographic keys, user input, or secrets of the operating system. This skill set and knowledge will give you the ability to spot these side channels in hardware and software projects. We will then cover countermeasures and mitigation strategies that allow you to develop side-channel-resilient hardware and software and protect your security-critical applications and sensitive information.

On the software side, we will learn about branch prediction an prefetching. We will learn how these mechanisms can be subverted into powerful side-channel attacks. You will need programming skills (C, C++, Python) and we will provide you with the knowledge required beyond these, including basics on hardware design, computer architecture, operating systems, and cryptography.

You will learn which attacks are relevant in the concrete environments you are working with, extending to your risk assessment skills. In a set of small exercises, you will demonstrate that you understood the techniques behind simple power analysis, and differential power analysis, as well as prefetch side channels and branch-prediction side channels.

What you'll learn

• - Understand where real-world systems expose physical side channels and how to exploit them
• - How and why Simple Power Analysis and Differential Power Analysis work
• - Understand the security risks posed by physical side-channel attackers as well as sophisticated software-based attackers
• - Understand how these attacks can be mitigated.