Standardizing Bad Cryptographic Practice

Abstract

We provide an analysis of IEEE standard P1735, which describes methods for encrypting electronic-design intellectual property (IP), as well as the management of access rights for such IP. We find a surprising number of cryptographic mistakes in the standard. In the most egregious cases, these mistakes enable attack vectors that allow us to recover the entire underlying plaintext IP. Some of these attack vectors are well-known, e.g. padding-oracle attacks. Others are new, and are made possible by the need to support the typical uses of the underlying IP; in particular, the need for commercial system-on-chip (SoC) tools to synthesize multiple pieces of IP into a fully specified chip design and to provide syntax errors. We exploit these mistakes in a variety of ways, leveraging a commercial SoC tool as a black-box oracle.