Defeating SCA countermeasures on a real device

Important information

Workshop trainers: Alexandru Geana and Thomas Rinsma
Max: 30 participants
Workshop prerequisites: attendees should bring their (Windows or Linux) laptops, be able to install a Linux VM (~10GB) and have two USB ports free in their laptops. Mac OS is sadly not supported. To prevent downtime during the practical, please download and setup the prerequisites from https://riscasim.riscurehack.me/setup.html before the workshop
Type of workshop: interactive, hands-on exercises
Duration: 3.5hrs
Location: Training room is located in front of the reception desk of Hotel Ivan.

If you want to participate in the training, send an email to: www-croatia[AT]science.ru.nl
Please write in the subject line Riscure Training. Admission is on first-come first-serve basis. We will also maintain a waiting list.

Workshop description

This year, Riscure will hold a workshop on side channel analysis, starting from the basic theory, and continuing with attacks and countermeasures. We will provide each participant with an RHme3 board built with an ATXmega microcontroller and running a special firmware that simulates an oscilloscope.

The practical aspect of the workshop consists of using the RHme3 board to collect ''simulated'' traces while cryptographic algorithms are running. The traces can then be used to perform the SCA attacks.

Participants will be able to implement their own countermeasures and break their own implementations. This workshop is mostly aimed towards people with none or little experience with SCA. However, more experienced people are welcome to join as well and experiment with the simulated oscilloscope setup.

About the company

Riscure is the leading industry party in side channel and fault injection tooling. With years of experience in security evaluation and tool development, Riscure is considered by many the preferred partner in side channel testing. Riscure is experienced on giving trainings of SCA and FI regardless of background, knowledge or experience of the attendees. Our training is provided by our own security analyst staff that performs side channel tests with Inspector on a daily basis.

Instructor Bio

Alexandru Geana is a Security Analyst at Riscure. He attended TU/Eindhoven and finished the Kerckhoffs Programme in 2015. Since then he has been active in the fields of Embedded Systems Security and Mobile(/Android) Security. His main interests are reverse engineering, exploitation and whitebox cryptography.

Thomas Rinsma obtained his M.Sc in 2017 from the Radboud University where he attended the TRU/e security master. He is currently working as a Security Analyst at Riscure. Besides being involved with running the latest edition of Riscure’s yearly hardware CTF (RHme3), he mostly works in the mobile (payment) security market.