Crypto Chip-set Security

The biggest challenge for professionals working on design and development of crypto chip-sets is to be continuously up-to-date regarding the attack methods and their mitigation. Serving them, this course explains various physical and logical attacks on security chips, possible countermeasures and best practices.

Regarding physical attacks, the passive attacks are detailed through optical reverse engineering and various side channel analysis methods, while active attacks are discussed with special emphasis on fault injection, Focused Ion Beams and hardware Trojans. The very powerful passive and active combined attack (PACA) type is introduced through the practical example of RSA implementations. Discussion of logical attacks not only covers practical attacks against specific cryptographic algorithm implementations, but also the relevant programming bugs and mitigation techniques like buffer overflow or integer problems are introduced.

Finally, a set of guidelines is assembled to follow by engineers working in this field, and the testing methods are presented that can help to find and avoid the discussed security flaws and vulnerabilities.