Roughly three months ago, we launched our second RP2350 hacking challenge, this time focusing on the side-channel analysis of our new SCA-hardened (side-channel analysis–hardened) AES library.
We’ve had some good chats with a number of teams and individuals working on this challenge, and it looks like our new AES library is thus far unvanquished, but we hear that progress is being made and a bit of extra time might provide ample opportunity to ruin our day (yay…). You’ll no doubt be glad to hear that we’re therefore extending the submission deadline for this challenge to midnight (UK time) on 31 December 2025. The RP2350 Hacking Challenge 2 page is the place to go for full details of the challenge: happy hacking!
AE-yes?
AES is a very popular and important block cipher encryption standard. It has been widely used for over twenty years now.
As part of our recent 2.2.0 Pico SDK release, we added a useful new tool that allows folks developing designs with RP235x to AES-encrypt their software and data stored in flash, and securely decrypt into on-chip SRAM at boot (RP2350 has lots of on-chip SRAM, and we mainly boot from external QSPI flash chips). This new self-decrypting binary support is very important to customers who wish to protect their software and application data from reverse engineering, decompiling, flash readout, or modification.
Many AES implementations (both software and hardware) are susceptible to side-channel attacks. Most of these attacks involve recording and carefully analysing many hundreds of thousands (or millions) of traces that detail various goings-on in the chip while it is decrypting AES-encrypted data. Typically, these are time-series measurements of power consumption and/or electromagnetic emissions. Using these measurements, it is often possible to learn or spot data that is being leaked, and this data in turn can be used to reduce the effective length of the AES key, often to the point where it’s feasible to brute-force the rest of the key. Once you have that, you can cause all sorts of mischief.
Our friends at NewAE make some of the best SCA tools out there
To help protect RP2350 against this, we worked with some talented folks to harden and test our custom AES implementation against these side-channel attacks. You can read more about this hardening work here.
Take a look at the RP2350 Hacking Challenge 2 page to find out more about our current, newly extended challenge, and watch this space for an update on the results once the new deadline has passed.
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Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/rp2350 ... xtra-time/