Indirect control-flow transfers complicate control-flow graph (CFG) construction, thereby reducing the precision of static analyses and control-flow integrity mechanisms in embedded systems. While previous work has primarily focused on resolving indirect jump targets, comparatively little attention has been devoted to understanding the reasons behind their generation. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of the origins of indirect jumps in compiled binaries. We introduce a taxonomy that characterizes the programming constructs and compiler transformations responsible for their generation. Our analysis encompasses C, C++, Fortran, and Rust programs compiled with GCC and LLVM at multiple optimization levels, targeting the 32-bit RISC-V instruction set. We then quantify the prevalence of each identified category over representative benchmarks and analyze differences across programming languages and compilation configurations. By clarifying the origins of indirect control transfers, this work provides insight into their impact on CFG precision and the static analysis of embedded software.

A fault attack is a well-known technique where the behaviour of a chip is voluntarily disturbed by hardware means in order to undermine the security of the information handled by the target. In this paper, we explore how Electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) can be used to create vulnerabilities in sound software, targeting a Cortex-M3 microcontroller. Several use-cases are shown experimentally: control flow hijacking, buffer overflow (even with the presence of a canary), covert backdoor insertion and Return Oriented Programming can be achieved even if programs are not vulnerable in a software point of view. These results suggest that the protection of any software against vulnerabilities must take hardware into account as well.

International audience

Pairing based cryptography (PBC) is touted as an efficient approach to address usability and privacy issues in the cyberspace. Like most cryptographic algorithms, PBC must be robust not only against theoretical cryptanalysis but also against practical physical attacks such as fault injections. The computation of the Tate pairing can be divided into two parts, the Miller Algorithm and the Final Exponentiation. In this paper, we describe practical implementations of fault attacks against the Miller Algorithm validating common fault models used against pairings. In the light of the implemented fault attacks, we show that some blinding techniques proposed to protect the algorithm against Side-Channels Analyses cannot be used as countermeasures against the implemented fault attacks.

Differential fault analysis (DFA) techniques have been widely studied during the past decade. To our best knowledge, most DFA techniques on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) either impose strong constraints on the fault injection process or require numerous faults in order to recover the secret key. This article presents a simple methodology based on information theory which allows to adapt the number of required faults for the analysis to the fault injection process. With this technique, the constraints on the fault model to recover the last round key are considerably lowered. Additionally, entropy is proposed as a tool to apprehend the most complex fault models in DFA. A practical realization and simulations are presented to illustrate our methodology.