20 Ways past Secure Boot

March 19, 2014 (at 2:30 p.m.) in Attack & Research

This talk presents an overview of all things that can go wrong when developers attempt to implement a chain of trust also called ‘secure boot’. This talk is not so much focused at things like UEFI and Microsoft lockdown, but more at the general application in pay-tv, gaming and mobile devices. On both sides of the fence secure boot is a vital mechanism to understand. Starting out from design mistakes, we look at crypto problems, logical and debug problems and move towards side channel problems such as timing attacks and glitching. All problems will be illustrated with either public examples or the presenters experiences. To illustrate the practicality, an electromagnetic glitch attack will be demonstrated.

Job de Haas

Job de Haas holds an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and has a track record in the security industry of more than 15 years. He has experience evaluating the security of a wide range of embedded platforms, such as IPTV decoders, satellite receivers, mobile phones, smart meters and a variety of modems (ADSL, Wireless). Further, he is a specialist in the reverse engineering of applications and consumer electronics. At Riscure, Job is the senior specialist in charge of security testing of embedded devices for high-security environments. Amongst others, he assessed the protection of pay television systems against side channel and card-sharing attacks for conditional access providers. Job has participated in the creation of several certification schemes for customers of embedded products. Job has a long speaking history at international conferences, including talks on security of mobile technologies, reverse engineering of firmware and side channel attacks on embedded systems.