A Journey into Silicon Security Speaker: Olivier Thomas

That talk is a deep dive into Integrated Circuits (ICs) and their security. It is constructed to explain what makes hardware attacks possible at the silicon level. Non-, Semi- and fully Invasive attacks will be explained from their physical / logical origins based on real world examples. The security of Integrated Circuits should rely on design, rather than on obfuscation alone. The reason for this is that reverse-engineering is always part of the workflow used by attackers. This has major implications for the ways in which chips should be designed. This talk is also to raise awareness of silicon attacks and will detail tools and techniques necessary to perform reverse-engineering and analysis of ICs. While chip Reverse-Engineering can be used to recover the functionality of the IC from images of the device, a special focus will be put on the combination of reverse-engineering and invasive attacks to show how embedded firmware and other data such as cryptographic keys can be dumped.

Speaker

Olivier Thomas

Company

Texplained SARL

Twitter

@reivilo_t

linkedin

reiviloT

Oliver THOMAS studied Electrical Engineering (EE) and subsequently worked for a major semiconductor manufacturer designing analog circuits. Olivier then began to work in the field of Integrated Circuit (IC) security as the head of one of the world’s leading IC Analysis Labs. The lab primarily focused on securing future generation devices as well as developing countermeasures for current generation devices to combat piracy and counterfeiting. During this time Olivier helped develop many new and novel techniques for semi- and fully-invasive IC analysis. He has an extensive background in all the Failure Analysis techniques and equipment necessary for accessing vulnerable logic on a target device. Combined with his experience as an IC design engineer, Olivier continues to develop techniques for automating the analysis process and to create state of the art counter-measures against IC attacks. Olivier is the author of ARES (Automated Reverse Engineering Software), a software toolchain for the efficient analysis of ICs. He is the founder and CTO at Texplained SARL.