Attacking Hardware AES with DFA

February 27th, 2019, 18:15 Posted By: wraggster

Heres some PSVita Hacking news from Yifan Lu

For the past couple of months, I have been trying to extract the hardware keys from the PlayStation Vita. I wrote a paper describing the whole process with all the technical details, but I thought I would also write a more casual blog post about it as well. Consider this a companion piece to the paper where I will expand more on the process and the dead ends than just present the results. In place of technical accuracy, I will attempt to provide more intuitive explanations and give background information omitted in the paper.
DFA

For a nice practical introduction to differential fault analysis, check out this article on using DFA to attack white-box software AES. The authors give a good explanation that is not overly academic and actually presents code at the end (which we use for our attack). The main idea of DFA is this: we can use glitch attacks on AES hardware just as we can on processors, but instead of using it to control code execution, we use it to make faulty AES encryptions with the right key. Since AES is a brittle algorithm, slight modifications will cause it to leak information about the key in unintended ways and we abuse this fact.
Unfortunately, there is not much interest in AES DFA outside of academia. A search on Github shows a handful of results and overall we only found two serious implementation of AES DFA attacks. dfa-aes is an implementation of a 2009 paper where a single precise fault in round 8 and 2 32 232 brute force can yield the AES-128 key. phoenixAES (from the authors of that article linked to above) is an implementation of a 2003 paper which requires two separate precise faults in round 8 and no brute force (although later on, we will later describe some modifications that relaxes the “precise fault” requirement and increases the required brute force to about 2 8 28). There has been many other papers published from 2002 to 2016 describing attacks that assume faults in earlier rounds or more bytes are affected by a fault or other parts of the algorithm. However, we were not able to find any source code attached to these papers. In the end, we derived our work from phoenixAES even though it was not state-of-the-art because writing code is boring and most of the improvements in the literature do not mean much in practice (one hour vs five minutes is a lot of time but if you only have to do it once, the time it takes to write all that code and debug it would negate the gain).
With that rant aside, the main bulk of work is in perfecting our glitching setup in order to inject precise (as in corrupting no more than a single byte) faults on the AES engine during round 8. Once we have that in place, we can feed the collected samples into phoenixAES (or dfa-aes) and it should Just Work.
DPA

Before getting into how we designed the setup for DFA glitching, it is worth sidetracking into our (failed) attempt on a DPA attack on the Vita as context for some of the design decisions made later on. Differential power analysis is a type of side channel attack where if the attacker observes the power consumption of the AES engine while it is operating with a secret key, then it is possible to leak the key. First she hypothesizes the value of a part of the key. Next, the attacker defines a power usage model of the AES engine to predict how much power is consumed if a random input is encrypted and the hypothesis was correct. Finally, she actually runs the engine with that input and measures the actual power consumption to see how close the prediction was. By repeating this many times and for different parts of the key, it is possible to find the entire key. Chipwhisperer wiki has a great introduction to how differential power analysis works that goes into much more details but is still approachable.

More https://yifan.lu/2019/02/22/attackin...-aes-with-dfa/

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