In the previous post a setup and a technique to extract a representative section of a powertrace of a specific instruction of a STM32F3 processor were described. This section is called a “template”. These templates should later be used to identify instructions via a power sidechannel and reconstruct the flow of an unknown program on a controller that can not be dumped via JTAG. In this part of our poweranalysis series the extracted templates from the previous post will be analyzed to determine whether they are representative enough to reverse engineer entire programs from a powertrace.
This is the first part of a three part series about power analysis based software reverse engineering. It is part of our work in the SecForCARs project and the bachelor thesis ‘Poweranalyse basiertes Software Reverse Engineering mit Hilfe von Fuzzing’. The results will be summarized in this blogpost series. In this first part the goals of the research and the power analysis template extraction process are presented.
Disclaimer: The elaboration and software project associated to this subject are results of a Bachelor’s thesis created at SCHUTZWERK in collaboration with Aalen University by Philipp Schmied.
While car manufacturers steadily refine and advance vehicle systems, requirements of the underlying networks increase even further. Striving for smart cars, a fast-growing amount of components are interconnected within a single car. This results in specialized and often proprietary car protocols built based on standardized technology.
