Seminar on Security of Embedded Electronic Systems

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Guillaume Duc


Securing untrusted external memories in an embedded system: CyptoPage and SecBus architectures

Embedded systems are the target of numerous physical and logical attacks that aim to compromise security properties such as confidentiality or integrity of data manipulated. In this talk we will focus on large embedded systems with at least one processor (usally integrated into a system-on-chip) and external memories. The code of the applications running on the system and the data they manipulate are stored in these external memories where they are vulnerable to several attacks: memory bus probing, DMA attacks from a rogue device, etc.

I will present two architectures that protect the confidentiality and integrity of data stored in untrusted external memories: CryptoPage and SecBus. We will study the cryptographic primitives used in these architectures, the impacts on both hardware and software, and performance results.