By semi-internal I mean functions that are only public because they're used in
more than once compilation unit in the library (for example in ecc.c and
ecc_dsa.c) but should not really be part of the public-facing API.
Inspection of the generated assembly showed that before this commit, armcc 5
was optimizing away the successive reads to the volatile local variable that's
used for double-checks. Inspection also reveals that inserting a call to an
external function is enough to prevent it from doing that.
The tested versions of ARM-GCC, Clang and Armcc 6 (aka armclang) all keep the
double read, with our without a call to an external function in the middle.
The inserted function can also be changed to insert a random delay if
desired in the future, as it is appropriately places between the reads.
This hardens against attacks that glitch the conditional branch by making it
necessary for the attacker to inject two consecutive faults instead of one. If
desired, we could insert a random delay in order to further protect against
double-glitch attacks.
Also, when a single glitch is detected we report it.
This is a first step in protecting against fault injection attacks: the
attacker can no longer change failure into success by flipping a single bit.
Additional steps are needed to prevent other attacks (instruction skip etc)
and will be the object of future commits.
The return value of uECC_vli_equal() should be protected as well, which will
be done in a future commit as well.
This avoids the need for each calling site to manually regularize the scalar
and randomize coordinates, which makes for simpler safe use and saves 50 bytes
of code size in the library.
Why: this protects against potential side-channels attacks. This
counter-measure is for example effective against Template SPA. Also, the
bignum arithmetic as implemented in TinyCrypt isn't entirely regular, which
could in principle be exploited by an attacker; randomizing the coordinates
makes this less likely to happen.
Randomizing projective coordinates is also a well-known countermeasure to DPA.
In the context of the scalar multiplication in ECDSA, DPA isn't a concern
since it requires multiple measurements with various base points and the same
scalar, and the scalar mult in ECDSA is the opposite: the base point's always
the same and the scalar is always unique. But we want protection against the
other attacks as well.
How: we use the same code fragment as in uECC_shared_secret in ecc_dh.c,
adapted as follows: (1) replace p2 with k2 as that's how it's called in this
function; (2) adjust how errors are handled.
The code might not be immediately clear so here are a few more details:
regularize_k() takes two arrays as outputs, and the return value says which one
should be passed to ECCPoint_mult(). The other one is free for us to re-use to
generate a random number to be used as the initial Z value for randomizing
coordinates (otherwise the initial Z value is 1), thus avoiding the use of an
extra stack buffer.
We called in tinycrypt in the file names, but uecc in config.h, all.sh and
other places, which could be confusing. Just use tinycrypt everywhere because
that's the name of the project and repo where we took the files.
The changes were made using the following commands (with GNU sed and zsh):
sed -i 's/uecc/tinycrypt/g' **/*.[ch] tests/scripts/all.sh
sed -i 's/MBEDTLS_USE_UECC/MBEDTLS_USE_TINYCRYPT/g' **/*.[ch] tests/scripts/all.sh scripts/config.pl
