Pascal Sasdrich

Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany

Title:

SILVER – Statistical Independence and Leakage Verification

Abstract:

Implementing cryptographic functions securely in the presence of physical adversaries is still a challenge although a lion’s share of research in the physical security domain has been put in development of countermeasures. Among several protection schemes, masking has absorbed the most attention of research in both academic and industrial communities, due to its theoretical foundation allowing to provide proofs or model the achieved security level. In return, masking schemes are difficult to implement as the implementation process often is manual, complex, and error-prone. This motivated the need for formal verification tools that allow the designers and engineers to analyze and verify the designs before manufacturing.

In this talk, we will discuss a new framework to analyze and verify masked implementations against various security notions using different security models as reference. In particular, the framework – which directly processes the resulting gate-level netlist of a hardware synthesis – particularly relies on Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (ROBDDs) and the concept of statistical independence of probability distributions. Compared to existing tools, the framework captivates due to its simplicity, accuracy, and functionality while still having a reasonable efficiency for many applications and common use-cases.

Biography:

Pascal Sasdrich is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Security Engineering at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. His main areas of work focus on hardware security, in particular the secure and efficient design of cryptographic implementations and processors. For this, his research mainly focuses on computer-aided security and the development of security-aware EDA tools in order to allow researchers and engineers to consider physical and hardware security as early as possible, enable security-by-design and bring together the fields of hardware design and hardware security.

Pascal Sasdrich received his B.SC. and M.Sc. in IT-Security/Information Technology at Ruhr-University in 2012 and 2015 respectively. Further, he received his PhD in 2018 from Ruhr-University Bochum under the supervision of Tim Güneysu for his thesis entitled “Cryptographic Hardware Agility for Physical Protection”. Before he joined the Chair for Security Engineering at Ruhr-University Bochum as a postdoctoral researcher in 2019, he was employed as a hardware security engineer at the Cryptography Research Division of Rambus located in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

https://www.seceng.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/chair/staff/Pascal_Sasdrich/