Biblio

Providing efficient protection against energy consumption based side channel attacks (SCAs) for block ciphers is a relevant topic for the research community, as current overheads are in the 100x range. Unprofiled SCAs exploit information leakage from the outmost rounds of a cipher; we propose a solution encasing it between keyed transformations amenable to an efficient SCA protection. Our solution can be employed as a drop in replacement for an unprotected implementation, or be retrofit to an existing one, while retaining communication capabilities with legacy insecure endpoints. Experiments on a Cortex-M4 μC, show performance improvements in the range of 60x, compared with available solutions.

Side Channel Attacks (SCA) have proven to be a practical threat to the security of embedded systems, exploiting the information leakage coming from unintended channels concerning an implementation of a cryptographic primitive. Given the large variety of embedded platforms, and the ubiquity of the need for secure cryptographic implementations, a systematic and automated approach to deploy SCA countermeasures at design time is strongly needed. In this paper, we provide an overview of recent compiler-based techniques to protect software implementations against SCA, making them amenable to automated application in the development of secure-by-design systems.