MITIGATING SECURE BOOTLOADER VULNERABILITIES IN FLASHLESS MICROCONTROLLERS

Petro Venherskyi, Mykoa Scherbyna

Анотація


The potential for man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks targeting secure bootloaders in microcontrollers without internal ash memory is examined, utilizing a device that monitors SPI bus communication. The possibility of bypassing cryptographic signature verication of embedded rmware is demonstrated by precisely identifying the optimal moment for fault injection or executing modied rmware immediately after signature validation. Additionally, the limited ability to modify AES-CTR encrypted code without knowledge of the encryption key is illustrated. A hardware-based protection mechanism is proposed to mitigate the described MITM attack during execution by employing message authentication codes

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.30970/vam.2024.32.13307

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