Best oral presentation at the IX Jornadas de I+D+i & 1st International Workshop on STEM

Alejandro Casado Galán, student of the Master in Microelectronics offered by the Universidad de Sevilla and the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla, with the direction of IMSE researchers Erica Tena Sánchez and Antonio Acosta Jiménez, has obtained one of the prizes for the best oral presentation at the IX Jornadas de I+D+i & 1st International Workshop on STEM, with the work 'Development of experimental setup for the realization of EM cartography in cryptographic systems'.

Award Workshop on STEM

The purpose of cryptography is to guarantee the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information. In electronic devices, we protect information using cryptographic algorithms. These transform the sequence through mathematical operations in various iterations, making the information impossible to recover without knowing a certain key with the computational power that we currently have. Although theoretically these algorithms are safe, the implementation in electronic circuits opens the door to vulnerabilities that can be exploited to obtain information about the encrypted message. By measuring, for example, the electromagnetic emission (EM) of a circuit with appropriate instruments for it and we have a sufficiently precise mathematical model of it, we can hack the device and obtain the key or encrypted message. This work focuses on the experimental development of a measurement setup to perform EM cartography of cryptographic systems. This makes it possible to determine the points of maximum emission of attackable information. The proposed experimental setup is fully automated from a PC, where with an XY table and the fixed position of the EM probe, the entire area of ??the device under test can be scanned and the EM emission captured at each point.

Desarrollo de setup experimental para la realización de cartografía EM en sistemas criptográficos.
A. Casado-Galán, V. Zúñiga-González, F.E. Potestad-Ordóñez, C. Fernández-García, C.J. Jiménez-Fernández and E. Tena-Sánchez.
IX Jornadas de I+D+i & 1st International Workshop on STEM, 2022

Alejandro Casado Galán finished his Physics Degree in 2022 at the Universidad de Sevilla. Before finishing his studies, he joined the TIC180 research group, developing his research activity at the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla (IMSE-cnm). He is currently studying the Master in Microelectronics, Design and Applications of Micro/Nanometrics Systems, offered by the Universidad de Sevilla and the IMSE. His field of research focuses on the evaluation of secure hardware for cryptographic applications.