The Hardware Hacking Handbook

12 Bench Time: Differential Power Analysis

This lab walks through a complete attack on a bootloader that’s using AES-256 encryption in order to demonstrate how to use side-channel power analysis on practical systems. The AES-256 bootloader in this lab is specifically created for this exercise. The victim microcontroller will receive a command through a serial connection, decrypt the command, and confirm that the included signature is correct. Then, it will save the code into memory only if the signature check succeeded. To make this system more robust against cryptographic attacks, the bootloader will use cipher block chaining (CBC) mode. ...