Chapter 4 - Resilience Against Physical Attacks

Abstract

The types of physical attacks on smart grid devices range from simple approaches, such as exploiting open interfaces, over side-channel attacks, to sophisticated methods such as fault attacks or integrated circuit (IC) reverse engineering. The basic methods to counteract such attacks include a system design, where information is also protected inside a device, and where no unwanted interfaces are exposed. Hardware security modules can be used to store secret data, such as key material, in a way that is more difficult to access by an attacker. They can be also used as a trust anchor for providing tamper resistance, and to prove a device’s integrity to a third party. A new alternative, and a main focus of this chapter, are physical uncloneable functions, where the individual characteristic of physical parameters of a piece of hardware are used to derive individual fingerprints used as a cornerstone for future encryption approaches.