Attacks & Analysis of OpenSSL AES crypto material from memory dumps

Mgr. Surya Prakash Mishra

Master's thesis

Abstract:

In recent years, side-channel attacks have seen significant progress. Among the different types of side-channel attacks, cold boot attack has been considered as a very powerful attack and has created considerable interest among researchers. The attack was discovered by a group of researchers from Princeton University in 2008 and exploits memory remanence property of random access memory. This attack can be used to beat hard disk encryption system, protecting sensitive information of IT products. Success of the attack depends upon detection and correction of sensitive information in the distorted data obtained during execution of the attack. In this thesis, an attempt has been made to improvise key recovery methods so that the attack can be made feasible, even when more errors have been introduced during the execution of attack. Experiments have also been carried out to study and improve the efficacy of these techniques for mounting the attack on realistic hard disk encryption systems like Truecrypt/VeraCrypt.

Keywords

clock glitching, cold boot attack, DIMM, EM attack, fault attack, light weight OS, memory remanence, power attack, side channel attack, SIMM, timing attack, voltage glitching.

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 22. 5. 2017

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 20. 6. 2017
• Supervisor: RNDr. Petr Švenda, Ph.D.
• Reader: prof. RNDr. Václav Matyáš, M.Sc.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Informatics

Master programme / field:
Informatics / Information Technology Security (eng.)