Attacks on cryptosystems implemented via VLSI: A review

Abstract

Serious threats to the VLSI crypto devices are posed by the Side Channel Attack (SCA) that utilizes the devices’ SCI (Side Channel Information) to break the entire cryptographic algorithm. Motive in this severe breach of security fence is to decipher the secret key for retrieval of confidential data. Recently, Hardware Trojan (HT) insertions that maliciously modify the circuitry of the crypto integrated chips are reported. Circuit behavioral alterations caused by the inserted Trojan, resulted in dysfunction/SCI leak of the device. The major focus of this paper is to report a comprehensive survey on cryptanalysis based strategies, employed by SCA and HT techniques, to successfully attack the VLSI crypto-devices. Cryptanalyst security breach schemes on specific VLSI devices are also reviewed. The employed attack-specific countermeasure techniques are also examined. Further, the limitations in implementation of these countermeasures in the system level design for ASIC, FPGA and SoC VLSI devices are provided. The weakness of each countermeasure for a specific application has also been analyzed.