Paper 2015/199

Side-Channel Security Analysis of Ultra-Low-Power FRAM-based MCUs

Amir Moradi and Gesine Hinterwälder

Abstract

By shrinking the technology and reducing the energy requirements of integrated circuits, producing ultra-low-power devices has practically become possible. Texas Instruments as a pioneer in developing FRAM-based products announced a couple of different microcontroller (MCU) families based on the low-power and fast Ferroelectric RAM technology. Such MCUs come with embedded cryptographic module(s) as well as the assertion that - due to the underlying ultra-low-power technology - mounting successful side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks has become very difficult. In this work we practically evaluate this claimed hardness by means of state-of-the-art power analysis attacks. The leakage sources and corresponding attacks are presented in order to give an overview on the potential risks of making use of such platforms in security-related applications. In short, we partially confirm the given assertion. Some modules, e.g., the embedded cryptographic accelerator, can still be attacked but with slightly immoderate effort. On the contrary, the other leakage sources are easily exploitable leading to straightforward attacks being able to recover the secrets.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. COSADE 2015
Keywords
side-channel analysisFRAMAES
Contact author(s)
amir moradi @ rub de
History
2015-03-04: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/199
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/199,
      author = {Amir Moradi and Gesine Hinterwälder},
      title = {Side-Channel Security Analysis of Ultra-Low-Power FRAM-based MCUs},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2015/199},
      year = {2015},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/199}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/199}
}
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