CINXE.COM
The First Thorough Side-Channel Hardware Trojan
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no"> <link href="/css/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"> <title>The First Thorough Side-Channel Hardware Trojan</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/eprint.css?v=10"> <style> a.toggle-open:after { content:' -'; font-weight: 800; } a.toggle-closed:after { content: " ›"; font-weight: 800; } .paper-abstract { white-space: pre-wrap; } #metadata dt { margin-top: 1rem; } #metadata dt + dd { /* gap between dt and first dd */ margin-top: .75rem; } #metadata dd { margin-left: 2rem; } #metadata dd.keywords { padding-bottom: .5rem; } span.authorName { margin-top: .5rem; font-style: italic; } </style> <script> MathJax = { tex: { inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']], displayMath: [ ['$$','$$'], ["\\[","\\]"] ], processEnvironments: false }, loader: { load: [ "ui/safe", "ui/lazy", ], }, options: { safeOptions: { allow: { URLs: "none", classes: "safe", cssIDs: "safe", styles: "safe", }, }, } }; </script> <script id="MathJax-script" async src="/js/mathjax/tex-chtml.js"></script> <meta name="citation_title" content="The First Thorough Side-Channel Hardware Trojan"> <meta name="citation_author" content="Maik Ender"> <meta name="citation_author" content="Samaneh Ghandali"> <meta name="citation_author" content="Amir Moradi"> <meta name="citation_author" content="Christof Paar"> <meta name="citation_journal_title" content="Cryptology ePrint Archive"> <meta name="citation_publication_date" content="2017"> <meta name="citation_pdf_url" content="https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/865.pdf"> <meta property="og:image" content="https://eprint.iacr.org/img/iacrlogo.png"/> <meta property="og:image:alt" content="IACR logo"/> <meta property="og:url" content="https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/865"> <meta property="og:site_name" content="IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive" /> <meta property="og:type" content="article" /> <meta property="og:title" content="The First Thorough Side-Channel Hardware Trojan" /> <meta property="og:description" content="Hardware Trojans have gained high attention in academia, industry and by government agencies. The effective detection mechanisms and countermeasures against such malicious designs are only possible when there is a deep understanding of how hardware Trojans can be built in practice. In this work, we present a mechanism which shows how easily a stealthy hardware Trojan can be inserted in a provably-secure side-channel analysis protected implementation. Once the Trojan is triggered, the malicious design exhibits exploitable side-channel leakage leading to successful key recovery attacks. Such a Trojan does not add or remove any logic (even a single gate) to the design which makes it very hard to detect. In ASIC platforms, it is indeed inserted by subtle manipulations at the sub-transistor level to modify the parameters of a few transistors. The same is applicable on FPGA applications by changing the routing of particular signals, leading to null resource utilization overhead. The underlying concept is based on a secure masked hardware implementation which does not exhibit any detectable leakage. However, by running the device at a particular clock frequency one of the requirements of the underlying masking scheme is not fulfilled anymore, i.e., the Trojan is triggered, and the device's side-channel leakage can be exploited. Although as a case study we show an application of our designed Trojan on an FPGA-based threshold implementation of the PRESENT cipher, our methodology is a general approach and can be applied on any similar circuit." /> <meta property="article:section" content="IMPLEMENTATION" /> <meta property="article:modified_time" content="2017-09-13T21:14:26+00:00" /> <meta property="article:published_time" content="2017-09-13T21:14:26+00:00" /> <meta property="article:tag" content="side-channel analysis" /> <meta property="article:tag" content="threshold implementation" /> <meta property="article:tag" content="hardware Trojan" /> </head> <body> <noscript> <h1 class="text-center">What a lovely hat</h1> <h4 class="text-center">Is it made out of <a href="https://iacr.org/tinfoil.html">tin foil</a>?</h4> </noscript> <div class="fixed-top" id="topNavbar"> <nav class="navbar navbar-custom navbar-expand-lg"> <div class="container px-0 justify-content-between justify-content-lg-evenly"> <div class="order-0 align-items-center d-flex"> <button class="navbar-toggler btnNoOutline" type="button" data-bs-toggle="collapse" data-bs-target="#navbarContent" aria-controls="navbarContent" aria-expanded="false"> <span class="icon-bar top-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar middle-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar bottom-bar"></span> </button> <a class="d-none me-5 d-lg-inline" href="https://iacr.org/"><img class="iacrlogo" src="/img/iacrlogo_small.png" alt="IACR Logo" style="max-width:6rem;"></a> </div> <a class="ePrintname order-1" href="/"> <span class="longNavName">Cryptology ePrint Archive</span> </a> <div class="collapse navbar-collapse order-3" id="navbarContent"> <ul class="navbar-nav me-auto ms-2 mb-2 mb-lg-0 justify-content-end w-100"> <li class="ps-md-3 nav-item dropdown"> <a class="nav-link dropdown-toggle" href="#" id="navbarDropdown" role="button" data-bs-toggle="dropdown" aria-expanded="false"> Papers </a> <ul class="dropdown-menu me-3" aria-labelledby="navbarDropdown"> <span class="text-dark mx-3" style="white-space:nowrap;">Updates from the last:</span> <li><a class="dropdown-item ps-custom" href="/days/7">7 days</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item ps-custom" href="/days/31">31 days</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item ps-custom" href="/days/183">6 months</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item ps-custom" href="/days/365">365 days</a></li> <li><hr class="dropdown-divider"></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/byyear">Listing by year</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/complete">All papers</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/complete/compact">Compact view</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="https://www.iacr.org/news/subscribe">Subscribe</a></li> <li><hr class="dropdown-divider"></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/citation.html">How to cite</a></li> <li><hr class="dropdown-divider"></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/rss">Harvesting metadata</a></li> </ul> </li> <li class="ps-md-3 nav-item dropdown"> <a class="nav-link dropdown-toggle" href="#" id="submissionsDropdown" role="button" data-bs-toggle="dropdown" aria-expanded="false"> Submissions </a> <ul class="dropdown-menu me-3" aria-labelledby="submissionsDropdown"> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/submit">Submit a paper</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/revise">Revise or withdraw a paper</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/operations.html">Acceptance and publishing conditions</a></li> </ul> </li> <li class="ps-md-3 nav-item dropdown"> <a class="nav-link dropdown-toggle" href="#" id="aboutDropdown" role="button" data-bs-toggle="dropdown" aria-expanded="false"> About </a> <ul class="dropdown-menu me-3" aria-labelledby="aboutDropdown"> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/about.html">Goals and history</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/news.html">News</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/stats">Statistics</a></li> <li><a class="dropdown-item" href="/contact.html">Contact</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> </div> <div class="dropdown ps-md-2 text-right order-2 order-lg-last"> <button class="btn btnNoOutline" type="button" id="dropdownMenuButton1" data-bs-toggle="dropdown" aria-expanded="false"> <img src="/img/search.svg" class="searchIcon" alt="Search Button"/> </button> <div id="searchDd" class="dropdown-menu dropdown-menu-end p-0" aria-labelledby="dropdownMenuButton1"> <form action="/search" method="GET"> <div class="input-group"> <input id="searchbox" name="q" type="search" class="form-control" autocomplete="off"> <button class="btn btn-secondary border input-group-append ml-2"> Search </button> </div> </form> <div class="ms-2 p-1 d-none"><a href="/search">Advanced search</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </nav> </div> <main id="eprintContent" class="container px-3 py-4 p-md-4"> <div class="row mt-4"> <div class="col-md-7 col-lg-8 pe-md-5"> <h4>Paper 2017/865</h4> <h3 class="mb-3">The First Thorough Side-Channel Hardware Trojan</h3> <p class="fst-italic mb-3"> Maik Ender, Samaneh Ghandali, Amir Moradi, and Christof Paar </p> <h5 class="mt-3">Abstract</h5> <p style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Hardware Trojans have gained high attention in academia, industry and by government agencies. The effective detection mechanisms and countermeasures against such malicious designs are only possible when there is a deep understanding of how hardware Trojans can be built in practice. In this work, we present a mechanism which shows how easily a stealthy hardware Trojan can be inserted in a provably-secure side-channel analysis protected implementation. Once the Trojan is triggered, the malicious design exhibits exploitable side-channel leakage leading to successful key recovery attacks. Such a Trojan does not add or remove any logic (even a single gate) to the design which makes it very hard to detect. In ASIC platforms, it is indeed inserted by subtle manipulations at the sub-transistor level to modify the parameters of a few transistors. The same is applicable on FPGA applications by changing the routing of particular signals, leading to null resource utilization overhead. The underlying concept is based on a secure masked hardware implementation which does not exhibit any detectable leakage. However, by running the device at a particular clock frequency one of the requirements of the underlying masking scheme is not fulfilled anymore, i.e., the Trojan is triggered, and the device's side-channel leakage can be exploited. Although as a case study we show an application of our designed Trojan on an FPGA-based threshold implementation of the PRESENT cipher, our methodology is a general approach and can be applied on any similar circuit.</p> </div> <div id="metadata" class="col-md-5 col-lg-4 ps-md-5 mt-4 mt-md-0"> <h5>Metadata</h5> <dl> <dt> Available format(s) </dt> <dd> <a class="btn btn-sm btn-outline-dark" href="/2017/865.pdf"> <img class="icon" src="/img/file-pdf.svg">PDF</a> </dd> <dt>Category</dt> <dd><a href="/search?category=IMPLEMENTATION"><small class="badge category category-IMPLEMENTATION">Implementation</small></a></dd> <dt>Publication info</dt> <dd>Published by the IACR in ASIACRYPT 2017</dd> <dt>Keywords</dt> <dd class="keywords"><a href="/search?q=side-channel%20analysis" class="me-2 badge bg-secondary keyword">side-channel analysis</a><a href="/search?q=threshold%20implementation" class="me-2 badge bg-secondary keyword">threshold implementation</a><a href="/search?q=hardware%20Trojan" class="me-2 badge bg-secondary keyword">hardware Trojan</a></dd> <dt>Contact author(s)</dt> <dd><span class="font-monospace"> amir moradi<span class="obfuscate"> @ </span>rub de </span> </dd> <dt>History</dt> <dd>2017-09-13: received</dd> <dt>Short URL</dt> <dd><a href="https://ia.cr/2017/865">https://ia.cr/2017/865</a></dd> <dt>License</dt> <dd><a rel="license" target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"> <img class="licenseImg" src="/img/license/CC_BY.svg" alt="Creative Commons Attribution" title="Creative Commons Attribution"><br> <small>CC BY</small> </a> </dd> </dl> </div> </div> <p class="mt-4"><strong>BibTeX</strong> <button id="bibcopy" class="ms-2 btn btn-sm btn-outline-dark" aria-label="Copy to clipboard" onclick="copyBibtex()"> <img src="/img/copy-outline.svg" class="icon">Copy to clipboard</button></p> <pre id="bibtex"> @misc{cryptoeprint:2017/865, author = {Maik Ender and Samaneh Ghandali and Amir Moradi and Christof Paar}, title = {The First Thorough Side-Channel Hardware Trojan}, howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2017/865}, year = {2017}, url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/865} } </pre> <script> var bibcopy; function triggerTooltip() { console.log('setting tooltip'); } window.onload = triggerTooltip; function copyBibtex() { let range = document.createRange(); range.selectNode(document.getElementById('bibtex')); window.getSelection().removeAllRanges(); window.getSelection().addRange(range); document.execCommand('copy'); window.getSelection().removeAllRanges(); let bibcopy = document.getElementById('bibcopy'); let copyTooltip = new bootstrap.Tooltip(bibcopy, {trigger: 'manual', title: 'Copied!'}); copyTooltip.show(); setTimeout(function() { copyTooltip.dispose(); }, 2000); } </script> </main> <div class="container-fluid mt-auto" id="eprintFooter"> <a href="https://iacr.org/"> <img id="iacrlogo" src="/img/iacrlogo_small.png" class="img-fluid d-block mx-auto" alt="IACR Logo"> </a> <div class="colorDiv"></div> <div class="alert alert-success w-75 mx-auto"> Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content. </div> </div> <script src="/css/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js"></script> <script> var topNavbar = document.getElementById('topNavbar'); if (topNavbar) { document.addEventListener('scroll', function(e) { if (window.scrollY > 100) { topNavbar.classList.add('scrolled'); } else { topNavbar.classList.remove('scrolled'); } }) } </script> </body> </html>