research-article

A first step towards automatic application of power analysis countermeasures

Authors:

Ali Galip Bayrak,

Francesco Regazzoni,

François-Xavier Standaert,

Paolo IenneAuthors Info & Claims

DAC '11: Proceedings of the 48th Design Automation Conference

Pages 230 - 235

https://doi.org/10.1145/2024724.2024778

Published: 05 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

In cryptography, side channel attacks, such as power analysis, attempt to uncover secret information from the physical implementation of cryptosystems rather than exploiting weaknesses in the cryptographic algorithms themselves. The design and implementation of physically secure cryptosystems is a challenge for both hardware and software designers. Measuring and evaluating the security of a system is manual and empirical, which is costly and time consuming; this work demonstrates that it is possible to automate these processes. We introduce a systematic methodology for automatic application of software countermeasures and demonstrate its effectiveness on an AES software implementation running on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller. The framework identifies the most vulnerable instructions of the implementation to power analysis attacks, and then transforms the software using a chosen countermeasure to protect the vulnerable instructions. Lastly, it evaluates the security of the system using an information-theoretic metric and a direct attack.

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Cited By

Gao PSong FChen T(2024)Compositional Verification of First-Order Masking Countermeasures against Power Side-Channel AttacksACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/363570733:3(1-38)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635707
Gao PZhang YSong FChen TStandaert F(2023)Compositional Verification of Efficient Masking Countermeasures against Side-Channel AttacksProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228627:OOPSLA2(1817-1847)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622862
Bossuet LGrosso VLara-Nino C(2023)Emulating Side Channel Attacks on gem5: lessons learned2023 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)10.1109/EuroSPW59978.2023.00036(287-295)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSPW59978.2023.00036
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A first step towards automatic application of power analysis countermeasures
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
      1. Embedded hardware
  2. Real-time systems
2. Hardware
  1. Very large scale integration design
    1. Application-specific VLSI designs
      1. Application specific integrated circuits

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DAC '11: Proceedings of the 48th Design Automation Conference

June 2011

1055 pages

ISBN:9781450306362

DOI:10.1145/2024724

General Chair:
Leon Stok
IBM Corp., Hopewell Jct., NY
,
Program Chairs:
Nikil Dutt
Univ. of California, Irvine, CA
,
Soha Hassoun
Tufts Univ., Medford, MA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

EDAC: Electronic Design Automation Consortium
SIGDA: ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation
IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA)

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 June 2011

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DAC '11

Sponsor:

EDAC
SIGDA

DAC '11: The 48th Annual Design Automation Conference 2011

June 5 - 10, 2011

California, San Diego

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,770 of 5,499 submissions, 32%

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DAC '25

Sponsor:
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62nd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference

June 22 - 26, 2025

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Cited By

Gao PSong FChen T(2024)Compositional Verification of First-Order Masking Countermeasures against Power Side-Channel AttacksACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/363570733:3(1-38)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635707
Gao PZhang YSong FChen TStandaert F(2023)Compositional Verification of Efficient Masking Countermeasures against Side-Channel AttacksProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228627:OOPSLA2(1817-1847)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622862
Bossuet LGrosso VLara-Nino C(2023)Emulating Side Channel Attacks on gem5: lessons learned2023 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)10.1109/EuroSPW59978.2023.00036(287-295)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSPW59978.2023.00036
Yilmaz BSehatbakhsh NDey MCheng CPrvulovic MZajić A(2022)A generalized approach to estimation of memoryless covert channel information leakage capacityArray10.1016/j.array.2022.10013114(100131)Online publication date: Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.array.2022.100131
Gao PXie HSong FChen T(2021)A Hybrid Approach to Formal Verification of Higher-Order Masked Arithmetic ProgramsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/342801530:3(1-42)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428015
Sangodoyin SWerner FYilmaz BCheng CUgurlu ESehatbakhsh NPrvulovic MZajic A(2021)Side-Channel Propagation Measurements and Modeling for Hardware Security in IoT DevicesIEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation10.1109/TAP.2020.303765969:6(3470-3484)Online publication date: Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TAP.2020.3037659
Winderix HMühlberg JPiessens F(2021)Compiler-Assisted Hardening of Embedded Software Against Interrupt Latency Side-Channel Attacks2021 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP51992.2021.00050(667-682)Online publication date: Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP51992.2021.00050
Sangodoyin SWerner FYilmaz BCheng CUgurlu ESehatbakhsh NPrvulovic MZajic A(2020)Remote Monitoring and Propagation Modeling of EM Side-Channel Signals for IoT Device Security2020 14th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP)10.23919/EuCAP48036.2020.9135387(1-5)Online publication date: Mar-2020
https://doi.org/10.23919/EuCAP48036.2020.9135387
Nahiyan APark JHe MIskander YFarahmandi FForte DTehranipoor M(2020)SCRIPTACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/338344525:3(1-27)Online publication date: 13-May-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3383445
Pengfei GHongyi XSun PZhang JSong FChen T(2020)Formal Verification of Masking Countermeasures for Arithmetic ProgramsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.3008852(1-1)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2020.3008852
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