Date: Mon, 02 Dec 96 09:23:18 GMT
From: jjq@dice.ucl.ac.be (Jean-Jacques Quisquater)
Subject: Radiation and crypto

Your electronic wallet in the Van Allen radiation belt, or
Electronic commerce at RISK in space?

Jean-Jacques Quisquater
UCL Crypto Group - Microelectronics Lab
November 30, 1996

[Note: This short remark was intended as a contribution to the rump session
of EUROCRYPT '97 but the subject is too hot to wait.]

From end September until now many announcements were issued about the
so-called Bellcore attack against tamper-resistant chips (example: smartcard
or chipcard for electronic commerce). The attack is based on the
(theoretical) possibility of flipping some bits (at some random position) of
the secret key, stored in RAM or E2PROM, before or during the computations
done by the chip.  Another attack is to induce some decoding error during
the execution of one instruction (Anderson and Kuhn).

One crucial question is the effectiveness of such attacks by malicious
hackers.  In fact, this problem was very well studied in the contexts of
nuclear physics and of space applications (what about the behavior of
semiconductors in such hard environments?). In that area, there is the
concept of SEE (Single Event Effect) and it is what we are trying to study!
A SEE is an event induced by radiation, temperature, microwave, ..., having
some effect one time on a device.  There are many studies about that. What
we need to know are the SEEs
--- relatively well focused (one or few bits are flipped),
--- and/or at a given moment,
--- and/or for a very short time.

Here are some references to begin the study. The reference newsgroup is 
sci.engr.semiconductors (others?).

- The NASA ASIC guide, published by JPL and NASA, Chapter 4, Design for
  radiation tolerance, 1993.

- Hardening integrated circuits against radiation effects, J.-P. Colinge
  and P. Francis, November 1996, Notes (66 pp.), Microelectronics Lab,
  UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (yes!, my lab),

- Single-Event-Effect mitigation from a system perspective, IEEE Trans. on
  Nuclear Science, vol. 43, April 1996, pp. 654-660.

- Laboratory tests for Single-Event Effects, IEEE Trans. on Nuclear Science,
  vol. 43, April 1996, pp. 678-686.
 
- Microbeam studies of Single-Event Effects, IEEE Trans. on Nuclear Science,
  vol. 43, April 1996, pp. 687-695.

- Soft errors susceptibility ands immune structures in dynamic random access
  memories (DRAM's) investigated by nuclear microprobes, IEEE Trans. on
  Nuclear Science, vol. 43, April 1996, pp. 696-704.

- 32-bit processing unit for embedded space flight applications, IEEE Trans.
  on nuclear science, vol. 43, June 1996, pp. 873-878.

- Single Event Effect testing of the Intel 80386 family and the 80486
  microprocessor, IEEE Trans. on Nuclear Science, vol. 43, June 1996, 
  pp. 879-885.

- Analysis of local and global transient effects in a CMOS SRAM,
  IEEE Trans. on Nuclear Science, vol. 43, June 1996, pp. 899-906.

- 1997 IEEE nuclear and space radiation effects conference, call for
  papers.

Jean-Jacques Quisquater, Universite catholique de Louvain, Place du Levant,
3, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium tel 32.10.47.25.41 jjq@dice.ucl.ac.be