SCA Strikes Back: Reverse Engineering Neural Network Architectures using Side Channels

This paper was selected for Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security 2020 and it presents a physical side-channel attack aiming at reverse engineering neural networks implemented on an edge device. The attack does not need access to training data and allows for neural network recovery by feeding known random inputs. We successfully reverse...

Evolutionary algorithms for designing reversible cellular automata

Reversible Cellular Automata (RCA) are a particular kind of shift-invariant transformations characterized by dynamics composed only of disjoint cycles. They have many applications in the simulation of physical systems, cryptography, and reversible computing. In this work, we formulate the search of a specific class of RCA – namely, those...

On the Importance of Initial Solutions Selection in Fault Injection

Fault injection attacks require the adversary to select suitable parameters for the attack. In this work, we consider laser fault injection and parameters like the location of the laser shot $(x,\ y)$, delay, pulse width, and intensity of the laser. The parameter selection process can be translated into an optimization problem. A very popular...

Keep it Unsupervised: Horizontal Attacks Meet Deep Learning

To mitigate side-channel attacks, real-world implementations of public-key cryptosystems adopt state-of-the-art countermeasures based on randomization of the private or ephemeral keys. Usually, for each private key operation, a “scalar blinding” is performed using 32 or 64 randomly generated bits. Nevertheless, horizontal attacks based on a...

What Is Your MOVE: Modeling Adversarial Network Environments

Finding optimal adversarial dynamics between defenders and attackers in large network systems is a complex problem one can approach from several perspectives. The results obtained are often not satisfactory since they either concentrate on only one party or run very simplified scenarios that are hard to correlate with realistic settings. To...

An Evolutionary View on Reversible Shift-Invariant Transformations

We consider the problem of evolving a particular kind of shift-invariant transformation – namely, Reversible Cellular Automata (RCA) defined by conserved landscape rules – using GA and GP. To this end, we employ three different optimization strategies: a single-objective approach carried out with GA and GP where only the reversibility...

One property to rule them all?: On the limits of trade-offs for S-boxes

Substitution boxes (S-boxes) are nonlinear mappings that represent one of the core parts of many cryptographic algorithms (ciphers). If S-box does not possess good properties, a cipher would be susceptible to attacks. To design suitable S-boxes, we can use heuristics as it allows significant freedom in the selection of required cryptographic...