Search

Ensuring protection against side channel attacks (SCAs) is a crucial requirement in the design of modern secure embedded systems. Profiled SCAs, the class to which template attacks and machine learning attacks belong, derive a model of the side channel behavior of a device identical to the target one, and exploit the said model to extract the key from the target, under the hypothesis that the side channel behaviors of the two devices match. We propose an architectural countermeasure against cross-device profiled attacks which differentiates the side channel behavior of different instances of the same hardware design, preventing the reuse of a model derived on a device other than the target one. In particular, we describe an instance of our solution providing a protected hardware implementation of the advanced encryption standard (AES) block cipher and experimentally validate its resistance against both Bayesian templates and machine learning approaches based on support vector machines also considering different state-of-the-art feature reduction techniques to increase the effectiveness of the profiled attacks. Results show that our countermeasure foils the key retrieval attempts via profiled attacks ensuring a key derivation accuracy equivalent to a random guess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Side-channel attacks are a concrete and practical threat to the security of computing systems, ranging from high performance platforms to embedded devices. In this paper, we will provide a brief systematization of the current existing approaches to analyze the side-channel vulnerability of an implementation, or automatically implement countermeasures, relying on methodologies typical of compiler systems. We will dedicate a spotlight to a significant progress in the countermeasures techniques which is represented by the application of dynamic compilation techniques to prevent a side-channel attacker from devising a model of the attacked application. We conclude the work highlighting promising research directions in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an efficient and effective methods to secure software implementations of cryptographic primitives on low-end embedded systems, against passive side channel attacks relying on the observation of power consumption or electro-magnetic emissions. The proposed approach exploits a modified LLVM compiler toolchain to automatically generate a secure binary characterized by a randomized execution flow. We improve the current state-of-the-art in dynamic executable code countermeasures removing the requirement of a writable code segment, and reducing the countermeasure overhead. Also, we provide a new method to refresh the random values employed in the share splitting approaches to lookup table protection. Finally, we devise an automated approach to protect spill actions onto the main memory, which are inserted by the compiler backend register allocator when there is a lack of available registers, thus, removing the need for manual assembly inspection. We report a validation of the performances of our approach on all the current ISO-standard block ciphers, employing an ARM Cortex-M4 based microcontroller as the validation platform. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Implementations of cryptographic algorithms continue to proliferate in consumer products due to the increasing demand for secure transmission of confidential information. Although the current standard cryptographic algorithms proved to withstand exhaustive attacks, their hardware and software implementations have exhibited vulnerabilities to side channel attacks, e.g., power analysis and fault injection attacks. This paper focuses on fault injection attacks that have been shown to require inexpensive equipment and a short amount of time. The paper provides a comprehensive description of these attacks on cryptographic devices and the countermeasures that have been developed against them. After a brief review of the widely used cryptographic algorithms, we classify the currently known fault injection attacks into low-cost ones (which a single attacker with a modest budget can mount) and high-cost ones (requiring highly skilled attackers with a large budget). We then list the attacks that have been developed for the important and commonly used ciphers and indicate which ones have been successfully used in practice. The known countermeasures against the previously described fault injection attacks are then presented, including intrusion detection and fault detection. We conclude the survey with a discussion on the interaction between fault injection attacks (and the corresponding countermeasures) and power analysis attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]