From New Technologies to New SolutionsExploiting FRAM Memories to Enhance Physical Security
(2013) 12th International Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications Conference (CARDIS 2013) — Location: Berlin (Germany) (27.November.2013)
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- Abstract
- Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) is a promising non-volatile memory technology that is now available in low-end microcontrollers. Its main advantages over Flash memories are faster write performances and much larger tolerated number of write/erase cycles. These properties are profitable for the efficient implementation of side-channel countermeasures exploiting pre-computations. In this paper, we illustrate the interest of FRAM-based microcontrollers for physically secure cryptographic hardware with two case studies. First we consider a recent shuffling scheme for the AES algorithm, exploiting randomized program memories. We exhibit significant performance gains over previous results in an Atmel microcontroller, thanks to the fine-grained programmability of FRAM. Next and most importantly, we propose the first working implementation of the masking with randomized look-up table" countermeasure, applied to reduced versions of the block cipher LED. This implementation provides unconditional security against side-channel attacks (of all orders! ) under the assumption that pre-computations can be performed without leakage. It also provides high security levels in cases where this assumption is relaxed (e.g. for context or performance reasons).
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Kerckhof, S., Standaert, F.-X., & Peeters, E. (2013). From New Technologies to New SolutionsExploiting FRAM Memories to Enhance Physical Security. In Aurélien Francillon, Pankaj Rohatgi (ed.), Proceedings of CARDIS 2013 (p. p. 16-29). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08302-5_2