Attacking Atmel's CryptoMemory EEPROM with special-purpose hardware

Abstract

Atmel's CryptoMemory devices are non-volatile memories with cryptographically secured access control. Recently, the authentication mechanism of these devices have been shown to be severely vulnerable. More precisely, to recover the secret key the published attack requires only two to six days of computation on a cluster involving 200 CPU cores. In this work, we identified and applied theoretical improvements to this attack and mapped it to a reconfigurable computing cluster, known as RIVYERA. Our solution provides significantly higher performance exceeding the previous implementation by a factor of 7.27, revealing the secret key obtained from the internal state in 0.55 days on average using only 30 authentication frames. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.