Project description
Innovative approach for countering cryptographic backdoors
The rapid growth of digitalisation has led to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and has presented numerous potential advantages for individuals and organizations worldwide. However, this growth also brings about increased risks, as cyber-attacks can result in significant damage to logistics, human lives, and privacy. With this in mind, the EU-funded EPoCH project aims to conduct research on the nature of backdoors, particularly focusing on dangerous cryptography attacks. These attacks can cause extensive damage to IoT devices and the overall system. The project also seeks to develop a range of efficient solutions to effectively counter low-level backdoors. Furthermore, EPoCH intends to create innovative proactive measures to tackle this issue and other related challenges.
Objective
The digital landscape is currently undergoing an evolution towards the Internet of Things. The IoT comes with a dramatically increased threat potential, as attacks can endanger human life and can lead to a massive loss of privacy of (European) citizens. A particular dangerous class of attacks manipulates the cryptographic algorithms in the underlying hardware. Backdoors in the cryptography of IoT devices can lead to system-wide loss of security. This proposal has the ambitious goal to comprehensively understand and counter low-level backdoor attacks. The required research consists of two major modules:
1) The development of an encompassing understanding of how hardware manipulations of cryptographic functions can actually be performed, and what the consequences are for the system security. Exploring attacks is fundamental for designing strong countermeasures, analogous to the role of cryptanalysis in cryptology.
2) The development of hardware countermeasures that provide systematic protection against malicious manipulations. In contrast to detection-based methods which dominate the literature, our approach will be pro-active. We will develop solutions for instances of important problems, including hardware reverse engineering and hardware hiding. Little is known about the limits of and optimum approaches to both problems in specific settings.
Beyond prevention of hardware Trojans, the research will have applications in IP protection and will spark research in the theory of computer science community.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
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Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
80539 Munchen
Germany