Engineers demonstrate two security methods that efficiently protect analog-to-digital converters from powerful attacks that aim to steal user data. Researchers are racing against hackers to develop stronger protections that keep data safe from malicious agents who would steal information by eaves
MIT engineers demonstrated that analog-to-digital converters in smart devices are vulnerable to power and electromagnetic side-channel attacks that hackers use to “eavesdrop” on devices and steal secret information. They developed two security strategies that effectively and efficiently block both types of attacks. Credit: MIT News
Much of the effort into preventing these “side-channel attacks” has focused on the vulnerability of digital processors. Hackers, for example, can measure the electric current drawn by a smartwatch’s CPU and use it to reconstruct secret data being processed, such as a password., which demonstrated that analog-to-digital converters in smart devices, which encode real-world signals from sensors into digital values that can be processed computationally, are vulnerable to power side-channel attacks.
“Side-channel attacks are always a cat and mouse game. If we hadn’t done the work, the hackers most likely would have come up with these methods and used them to attack analog-to-digital converters, so we are preempting the action of the hackers,” he adds. The researchers showed that an electromagnetic side-channel attack was just as effective as a power side-channel attack on an analog-to-digital converter, even when the probe was held 1 centimeter away from the chip. A hacker could use this attack to steal private data from an implantable medical device.An ADC takes an unknown input voltage, perhaps from a biometric sensor, and converts it to a digital value.
“The idea is to split up what would normally be a binary search process into smaller chunks where it becomes difficult to know what stage in the binary search process you are on. By introducing some randomness into the conversion, the leakage is independent from what the individual operations are,” Ashok explains.
Both methods are resilient against power and electromagnetic side-channel attacks without hurting the performance of the ADC. Ashok’s method only required 14 percent more chip area, while Chen’s did not require any additional area. Both use much less power than other secure ADCs.
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