Reverse engineering of embedded software using syntactic pattern recognition

Abstract

When a secure component executes sensitive operations, the information carried by the power consumption can be used to recover secret information. Many different techniques have been developped to recover this secret, but only few of them focus on the recovering of the executed code itself. Indeed, the code knowledge acquired through this step of Simple Power Analysis (SPA) can help to identify implementation weaknesses and to improve further kinds of attacks. In this paper we present a new approach improving the SPA based on a pattern recognition methodology, that can be used to automatically identify the processed instructions that leak through power consumption. We firstly process a geometrical classification with chosen instructions to enable the automatic identification of any sequence of instructions. Such an analysis is used to reverse general purpose code executions of a recent secure component. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.