Thrust (iii) - ​Research For Advanced Hardware Evaluation Techniques for Modern Systems with Security and Privacy Features

With a secure boot and disk encryption, most of the systems today can provide a minimum security level, which means no one except the legit owner of the data can have access to the information in the device, without proper access credentials. While disk encryption ensures that all information in the memory is encrypted and unintelligible without the secret key, secure boot provides a trusted execution environment to decrypt the sensitive data and perform operations with it.

However, a few physical-level methods have been reported to be successful in bypassing such security features. Cold boot attacks are known since over a decade ago and widely used in forensics, to dump memory contents for retrieving encryption keys. By supercooling memory at power-off, the content can be restored and dumped for forensic analysis. Realistic attacks can be performed for recovery of secret keys, which encrypt the underlying data.

The attacks were shown to be less efficient in later memory technologies. Only recently, the cold boot attack was revisited and shown to be powerful on a range of applications like post-quantum cryptography, hardware crypto-wallets, and modern laptops. Thus, it is important to investigate the resilience of modern systems to such attacks.

• Investigate the susceptibility of representative state of the art systems against cold boot attacks for security evaluation;

• Investigate the susceptibility of representative state of the art systems against fault attacks (e.g. laser, electromagnetic and glitching) for security evaluation.