Even though a cryptographic algorithm is proven to be mathematical secure for the best known attack, its implementation can lead to a so called side-channel. An example for such a channel is the power consumption or the EM emissions of the executing device. With side-channel analysis (SCA) the additional information of a power side-channel can be exploited to extract the secret key and therefore break the cryptosystem.

On challenge during the practical execution of SCA attacks consists in handling the huge amount of measurement data that is often needed in order to execute a successful attack. In order to reduce data complexity and therefore the amount of data that has to be processed for an attack, different dimensionality reduction methods can be used. A prominent example for such a method is the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA).

This work should provide a survey of different dimensionality reduction methods in the context of SCA. A focus should lie on PCA and LDA but an extensive literature review should be performed. As a starting point the reference [1] can be used. Advantages and disadvantages as well as the field of application of each method should be discussed.

[1] Cagli et al.: “Enhancing Dimensionality Reduction Methodsfor Side-Channel Attacks”, International Conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications (CARDIS), 2015

The Project Laboratory Secure SoC for the Internet-of-Things (IOT-LAB) relies heavily on practical lab work. In order to support the students with their practical work a tutor position is available.
During the lab several IOT sensor nodes (Texas Instruments Sensortag) are used in combination with their open source operating system “contiki-ng” written in C. The students have to solve several tasks including:

•     Capture and evaluate existing communication with Wireshark
•     Utilize several hardware peripherals of the used microcontroller
•     Use the MQTT and COAP protocols to achieve certain tasks
      (e.g. active LEDs or send current sensor values)
•     Secure the MQTT and Coap communication with either authenticated encryption
      (AES-GCM) or (D)TLS

The tasks of the tutor would be to provide support to the students in the form of weekly meetings or remote supervision (e.g. in a chat tool or via remote meetings) and help with the organization (preparation of the lab equipment etc.).

Timeline and working hours

From 01.05.2022 until the 15.07.2022 with a total of 6 hours weekly.

• Profound knowledge of the C programming language
• Knowledge about computer networks and the usage of Wireshark
• Microcontroller programming
• Ideally the lab was already completed in a previous semester
• Self organized work during the semester