Thibaut Heckmann is a theoretical physicist, he works on the interface of physics and computer security and bring a statistical physics approach to secure embedded systems against physical attacks. He was awarded his PhD from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (ENS), under the supervision of Pr. David Naccache. Furthermore, he is a member of the ENS Information Security Group, part of the Computer Science Department. He has started his PhD in November 2015. He is also a full-time data extraction specialist in the IRCGN Forensic Science Laboratory of the French Gendarmerie, IT Forensics Department, Data Extraction Expert Unit. From August 2017 to September 2018, he was an Academic Visitor at the Smart Card and Internet of Things Security Centre (SCC-IoT).
E-mail: thibaut.heckmann@rhul.ac.uk
Thibaut describes his research:
From a forensic point of view, securing embedded systems must be bypassed to extract data, which constitutes evidence for the criminal court. What interests him, is more particularly to recover data from damaged secured phones (air crash, accident, terrorism, submersion, etc.). He, therefore suggests to implement various attacks using statistical methods to carry signals from one component to infer the content. To assess the robustness of a memory component, he reaches physical reverse engineering of memory components, CPU and crypto-chips inside secure mobile phone. He realised prototypes for real-time control signals (high frequencies) in order to analyse and model the CPU-memory exchanges and other crypto-components.
Publications
T. Heckmann, T. Souvignet, D. Naccache, Electrically conductive adhesives, thermally conductive adhesives and uv adhesives in data extraction forensics, Digital Investigation 21 (2017) 53 – 64. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2017.02.009
T. Heckmann, T. Souvignet, S. Lepeer, D. Naccache, Low temperature low-cost 58 bismuth – 42 tin alloy forensic chip re-balling and re-soldering, Digital Investigation 19 (2016) 60-68. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2016.10.003
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