Research on Online Leakage Assessment

Leakage assessment is the most common approach applied for assessing side-channel information leakage and validating the effectiveness of side-channel countermeasures. Established evaluation approaches are usually based on Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA) that deployed in a divide and conquer flow with offline computations, which causes two apparent shortcomings in required memory and time. In this paper, a lightweight framework of online leakage assessment is proposed. The problems were analyzed and the evaluation approach was further validated with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The experimental results show that it can implement online processing on newly collected data, and instantly stop to give the result when detecting credible leakage. The online leakage assessment can significantly economize on memory and time. It has good performance when there is limited memory or real-time evaluations are needed.