International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Protecting against physical attacks through the use of secure codes

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Physical attacks exploit the real-life characteristics of a security device, for example (passively) monitoring its power consumption or (actively) triggering computational errors during processing, in order to recover its embedded secret keys. These attacks are particularly damaging against embedded devices.

Error-correcting codes aim at preventing errors in data by adding redundant information in data encoding in a way allowing detecting and - ideally - correcting errors. Error-correcting codes were initially designed as a protection against non-malicious errors, but might represent an interesting opportunity against malicious faults as well, and can possibly be extended in order to offer resistance against passive attacks as well.

The objective of this project is to investigate this research lead, designing codes offering resistance against physical attacks and assessing their effectiveness, in a context of smart grid/smart sensor applications.

The research will take place in the framework of a European project involving high-level academic and industrial experts. The researcher will also benefit from the dynamic research environment of the UCL Crypto Group (Université catholique de Louvain), with strong interactions with researchers working on related subjects.

The candidate should hold a PhD in mathematics, computer science or electronics, with strong interests in coding theory and cryptographic algorithms. A preliminary background in side-channel attacks is useful, but not mandatory.

Note that, due to the nature of the funding, this position is only available for a non-Belgian citizen in a situation of international mobility, i.e. the candidate should not have spent more than 24 months in Belgium over the last 3 years.