Work

Verifying redundant-check based countermeasures

Year: 2022

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: To thwart fault injection based attacks on critical embedded systems, designers of sensitive software use redundancy based countermeasure schemes. In some of these schemes, critical checks (i.e. conditionals) in the code are duplicated to ensure that an attacker cannot bypass such a check by flipping its result in order to get to a protected point (corresponding e.g. to a successful authentication or code integrity verification). This short paper presents a source-code-level verification technique of the correct implementation of such countermeasures. It is based on code instrumentation and deductive verification. The proposed technique was implemented in a tool prototype and evaluated on a real-life case study: the bootloader module of a secure USB storage device called WooKey, supposed to be resistant to fault injection attacks. We were able to prove the correctness of almost all redundant-check countermeasures in the module except two, and found an error in one of the unproven ones.

Source: ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

DOI: 10.1145/3477314.3507341

Authors: Thibault Martin, Nikolai Kosmatov, Virgile Prevosto

Institutions: Université Paris-Saclay, Thales (France)

Language: English

Topic: Security and Verification in Computing

Subfield: Hardware and Architecture

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche

Awards: G4656594441, Support of Advanced Test cOverage Criteria for RObust and Secure Software