08.20.08

Check out Poly’s underhanded hardware contest

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:37 am by XcottCraver

My friends at NYU Polytechnic (formerly Brooklyn Polytechnic) sent me a link to the next
Cyber Security Awareness Week challenge. CSAW is a big event with multiple security contests. One of them, inspired by the UCC, is an underhanded embedded system contest:

Cryptographers, scientists and engineers in the Orange Army have developed a solid-state cryptographic device, codenamed Alpha. The new device uses a strong 128-bit private key block cipher which has been shown to be resistant to modern cryptanalysis techniques.
[…]
Your challenge is to design and implement a set of trojans, to undermine Alpha’s cryptographic strength, and incorporate them into Alpha’s HDL without failing validation testing.

This is similar to last year’s Underhanded contest, except here you must add backdoors to someone else’s design—and instead of passing visual inspection of source, it must pass black-box testing, and have the same binary size and power consumption.

This is a security problem of increasing importance, as people send security-critical designs to be fabricated in faraway, insecure foundries. It is an unsolved (and maybe insoluble) problem to design and then test layouts so that backdoors can be detected.

You can find the full description at http://isis.poly.edu/csaw/embedded.

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