Smart On Smart

Michel Agoyan (1, 2) , Pirouz Bazargan Sabet (3) , Karl Bekkou , Bouquet Sylvain (1, 2) , Sébastien Le Henaff , E. Lepavec , Minh Huu Nguyen (1, 2) , Guillaume Phan , Bruno Robisson (1, 2) , Patrick Soquet , Franck Wajsbürt (4)

1 SAS-ENSMSE - Département Systèmes et Architectures Sécurisés
2 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information
3 CIAN - Circuits Intégrés Numériques et Analogiques
4 ALSOC - Architecture et Logiciels pour Systèmes Embarqués sur Puce

Among other threats, secure components are subjected to physical attacks whose aim is to recover the secret information they store. Most of the work carried out to protect these components generally consists in developing protections (or countermeasures) taken one by one. But this ``countermeasure-centered'' approach drastically decreases the performance of the chip in terms of power, speed and availability. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose a complementary approach: smart dynamic management of the whole set of countermeasures embedded in the component. Two main specifications for such management are required in a real world application (for example, a conditional access system for Pay-TV): it has to provide capabilities for the chip to distinguish between attacks and normal use cases (without the help of a human being and in a robust but versatile way); it also has to be based on mechanisms which dynamically find a trade-off between security and performance. In this article, a prototype which enables such security management is described. The solution is based on a double-processor architecture: one processor embeds a representative set of countermeasures (and mechanisms to define their parameters) and executes the application code. The second processor, on the same chip, applies a given security strategy, but without requesting sensitive data from the first processor. The chosen strategy is based on fuzzy logic reasoning to enable the designer to describe, using a fairly simple formalism, both the attack paths and the normal use cases. A proof of concept has been proposed for the smart card part of a conditional access for Pay-TV, but it could easily be fine-tuned for other applications.

Mots clés: Hardware tamper resistance; Countermeasures against fault and side-channel attacks; Architectures and implementations; Architectures for trusted computing; Security in commercial consumer applications; Application of fuzzy logic

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]; Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]

Michel Agoyan, Pirouz Bazargan Sabet, Karl Bekkou, Bouquet Sylvain, Sébastien Le Henaff, et al.. Smart On Smart. Colloque « Systèmes embarqués, sécurité et sûreté de fonctionnement », Dec 2010, Toulouse, France. ⟨cea-01097115⟩