ChipWhisperer-Husky is a palm-sized power analysis and fault injection tool (Crowdfunding)

NewAE Technology’s ChipWhisperer-Husky is a compact tool designed for side-channel power analysis and fault injection with features such as a high-speed logic analyzer used to visualize glitches, real-time data streaming for attacking asymmetric algorithms, and support for JTAG/SWD programming.

The security research company explains its device delivers a more stable and reliable experience compared to other off-the-shelf test gear such as oscilloscopes and function generators thanks to features such as synchronous sampling, which means the sample clock of your target device and the sample clock of ChipWhisperer-Husky can be perfectly aligned, or the ability to generate glitches, including clock glitches that can be less than a  nanosecond wide.

ChipWhisperer-Husky key features and hardware specifications:

• Synchronous clock for capture board and target board for significantly improved performance over a typical asynchronous oscilloscope setup
• 12-bit 200MS/s ADC for capturing power traces – It can be clocked at both the same clock speed as the target, as well as integer multiples of this frequency.
• Buffer Size – 100 KSample
• +55dB adjustable low noise gain, allowing the Lite to easily measure small signals
• Clock and voltage fault generation via FPGA-based pulse generation
• XMEGA (PDI), AVR (ISP), SAMBA (Microchip SAM) and STM32F (UART Serial) bootloader built-in
• JTAG/SWD debugging lines on CW 20-pin connector, as well as JTAG compatible 20-pin digital header (only works via OpenOCD)
• USB 2.0 port for host connection
• Streaming mode (>20MS/s 8-bit max) for long captures
• Trigger Out/Glitch Out SMB connector
• Aux In/Out SMB connector
• TraceWhisperer Arm Trace sniffing/triggering
• 20-pin user IO header with 8x data pins (3.3V) that can also be used for
  • JTAG/SWD (20-pin JTAG compatible)
  • Arm Trace
  • User Controlled
  • Logic Analyzer
  • Trigger pins
• Various trigger modes: Basic (Rising edge, falling edge, high, low)
  • Analog threshold
  • Analog Pattern (Sum of Absolute Difference, 32 Samples)
  • UART byte
  • Edge count
  • Arm Trace
  • Glitch based on internal VCO means glitch resolution isn’t based on target clock
  • Multiple programmable glitches

While the ChipWhisperer-Husky is not OSHW-certified, the core – including the Xilinx Artix-A15 FPGA logic, Microchip SAM3U microcontroller firmware, and computer code – is open-source and can be found on GitHub, documentation on RTFM, as well as on a separate GitHub repo with interactive ChipWhisperer tutorials using Jupyter notebooks.

NewAE Technology has been around for a while and we wrote about their PhyWhisperer-USB tool for USB security testing in 2019. They had introduced the ChipWhisperer-Lite and ChipWhisperer-Nano in the meantime, and the ChipWhisperer-Husky is just an evolution of the previous design with an enclosure and extra features.

The ChipWhisperer-Husky side-channel power analysis and fault injection tool launched on Crowd Supply a few weeks ago and raised over $75,000 so far. It is offered as part of a $549 Starter Kit with the ChipWhisperer-Husky unit, a CW313 target baseboard, iCE40 FPGA target, SAM4S Arm processor target, USB cables, SMA cables, 20-pin straight-through, and breakout cables, and suitable to run most of the tutorials for the solution. Worldwide shipping is free, and deliveries are expected to start in March 2023 with the company having secured future deliveries of core components for at least 400 units.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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