Breaking Integrated Circuit Device Security through Test Mode Silicon Reverse Engineering
Markus Kammerstetter, Markus Muellner, Daniel Burian, Christian Platzer, Wolfgang Kästner · 2014
Integrated Circuit (IC) device manufacturing is a challenging task and often results in subtle defects that can render a chip unusable. To detect these defects at multiple stages during the IC production process, test modes are inserted (Design For Testability). On the downside, attackers can use these test modes to break IC device security and extract sensitive information such as the firmware implementation or secret key material. While in high security smart cards the testing circuits are physically removed during production for this reason, in the majority of digital ICs the testing modes remain intact. Often they are undocumented, well-hidden and contain secret test commands. Utilizing search algorithms and/or side channel information, several attacks on secret testing modes have been presented lately. Accordingly, countermeasures that frequently rely on obfuscation techniques have been proposed as more advanced cryptographic methods would require significantly more space on the die and thus cause higher production costs. In this work, we show that limited effort silicon reverse engineering can be effectively used to discover secret testing modes and that proposed obfuscation based countermeasures can be circumvented without altering the analysis technique. We describe our approach in detail at the example of a proprietary cryptographic game authentication chip of a well known gaming console and present an FPGA implementation of the previously secret authentication algorithm.