Hardware Security

Research Topic -Hardware Security

Experimental ASsessment of Emerging Cryptosystems against Physical attacks (EASECAP)

With the rapid acceleration of digitisation driven by the recent societal developments, the topic of Digital Trust is even more relevant to everyone than ever. For this reason, NIST is currently running a few standardization contests, in particular for lightweight cryptography (addressing the IoT domain) and for post-quantum cryptography (addressing the novel weaknesses of public-key schemes against Quantum computing). The proposed algorithms have been thoroughly studied and analyzed from the theoretical point of view. Every cryptographic instance, however, needs to resist attacks targeting the implementation itself, be it hardware or software-based. Attacks based on the analysis of computation time, power consumption, electromagnetic emissions, or faulty computations are well-known threats that need to be properly addressed in many application domains. In this project, we want to explore the vulnerabilities of a few lightweight and post-quantum schemes against this class of attacks, and evaluate possible countermeasures for both. Shared paradigms may be adopted, but depending on the specific cases tailored solutions may be envisioned as well. In particular, implementation cost will play a major role in our analysis, as these two classes of cryptosystems may be on the opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of required resources.

Department & Campus

Center for Cybersecurity Systems and Networks, Amritapuri

Skillsets Preferred from Applicants

Verilog and VHDL programming, Need to work with ChipWhisperer and ChipShouter devices for Hardware Security