Secure electronic circuits and systems

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :

• AA1.1, AA1.2, AA1.3
• AA2.2
• AA3.2
• AA4.3
• AA5.3, AA5.6

• define the notion of secure cipher and argue about the difficulty of building efficient block ciphers that are provably secury in come formal model;
• identify the properties that enable guaranteeing the "practical" security of a cipher, as well as the structural weaknesses to be avoided when designing such ciphers;
• criticize the heuristic assumptions that are used in the (mathematical and physical) security analysis of a block cipher algorithm ofr its implementation;
• apply cryptanalytic techniques (for example statistical, algebraic, combinatorial) and evaluate their impact for the security of an encryption algorithm;
• describe and analyze the hardware architecture of a cryptographic implementation fulfilling a number of constraints provided in terms of cost or performance;
• implement a cryptographic algorithm in a low-cost microcontroller;
• evaluate the physical security of a cryptographic implementation against-side-channel attacks, taking advantage of physical information leakage (e.g. the power consumption of a microelectronic device performing some sensitive crypographic computations);
• propose countermeasures and protection mechanisms against different physical attacks and justify their relevance in function of the adversarial context considered;
• formalize physical properties that can be constructively exploited in cryptography (e.g. for random number generation, physically unclonable functions, IP protection);
• enumerate the pros and cons of a cryptographic algorithm in function of its compromise between (mathematical, physical) security vs. implementation efficiency;
• understand, summarize and present the results of a scientific paper related to the design and implementation of cryptograhic algorithms (e.g. such as published in conferenes like Eurocrypt, Crypto, Asiacrypt, CHES, FSA, ACM CCS, ...).