Cryptanalysis of GlobalPlatform Secure Channel Protocols

Abstract

GlobalPlatform (GP) card specifications are the de facto standards for the industry of smart cards. Being highly sensitive, GP specifications were defined regarding stringent security requirements. In this paper, we analyze the cryptographic core of these requirements; i.e. the family of Secure Channel Protocols (SCP). Our main results are twofold. First, we demonstrate a theoretical attack against SCP02, which is the most popular protocol in the SCP family. We discuss the scope of our attack by presenting an actual scenario in which a malicious entity can exploit it in order to recover encrypted messages. Second, we investigate the security of SCP03 that was introduced as an amendment in 2009. We find that it provably satisfies strong notions of security. Of particular interest, we prove that SCP03 withstands algorithm substitution attacks (ASAs) defined by Bellare et al. that may lead to secret mass surveillance. Our findings highlight the great value of the paradigm of provable security for standards and certification, since unlike extensive evaluation, it formally guarantees the absence of security flaws.

The Long and Winding Path to Secure Implementation of GlobalPlatform SCP10

“…Despite their importance, the SCP protocols have been overlooked in the literature for a long time. To the best of our knowledge, Sabt et al in [ST16] provided the first cryptanalysis for both SCP02 and SCP03. In their work, they showed a theoretical attack against SCP02 due to misuse of Initialization Vector (IV) in CBC mode.…”

“…GP defines a family of protocols called secure channel protocol (SCPs) to provide secure communication. Here, we are solely interested in SCP10, as the security analysis of SCP02 and SCP03 has been done in [ST16,AF18].…”

“…We underline that the specifications instruct to always set the encryption IV (Initialization Vector) to zero for encryption. This raises a known vulnerability described in [ST16]. Since we do not focus on this part, we skip the details that can be found in [Tec18].…”

Attacking GlobalPlatform SCP02-compliant Smart Cards Using a Padding Oracle Attack

“…To the best of our knowledge, there is no security analysis of SCP02 besides a theoretical attack by Sabt and Traoré [ST16]. They describe a chosen plaintext attack based on the fact that the encryption scheme is deterministic (data is encrypted in CBC mode with a static IV).…”