HOW THE ANALYSIS OF ELECTRICAL CURRENT CONSUMPTION OF EMBEDDED SYSTEMS COULD LEAD TO CODE REVERSING?

HOW THE ANALYSIS OF ELECTRICAL CURRENT CONSUMPTION OF EMBEDDED SYSTEMS COULD LEAD TO CODE REVERSING?

A practical approach of Power Analysis dedicated to reverse Engineering

This submission presents an experimental protocol developed to extract (part of) the code that runs on an embedded system using its power consumption

Experimental content (no math!), proof of concept, tools, limits, protections and prospective

The purpose of our study is to try to show how the analysis of electrical consumption of an embedded system enables us to find parts of the codes that it executes; this is done by presenting an operating mode, tools, a solid analysis, results, counter-measures and future research axes. It is all about trying to find another approach to the audit system. This approach aims at acquiring the code (reverse engineering) without having a physical access to the internal system components.

Our submission content will consist in making a quick presentation of the physical phenomenon at the origin of this type of information leak, confirming whether a sequence of instructions (opcode and data) can be found (reversed) by the analysis of electrical current used by the embedded system during the execution of a program, assessing then overcoming the technical difficulties in its achievement (Signal Acquisition, treatment and analysis, limitsÉ), presenting a proof of concept and possible countermeasures to limit the risks.

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