A new countermeasure against side-channel attacks based on hardware-software co-design

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting a new countermeasure against Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) attacks, whose implementation is based on a hardware-software codesign. The hardware architecture consists of a microprocessor, which executes the algorithm using a false key, and a coprocessor that performs several operations that are necessary to retrieve the original text that was encrypted with the real key. The coprocessor hardly affects the power consumption of the device, so that any classical attack based on such power consumption would reveal a false key. Additionally, as the operations carried out by the coprocessor are performed in parallel with the microprocessor, the execution time devoted for encrypting a specific text is not affected by the proposed countermeasure. In order to verify the correctness of our proposal, the system was implemented on a Virtex 5 FPGA. Different SCA attacks were performed on several functions of AES algorithm. Experimental results show in all cases that the system is effectively protected by revealing a false encryption key.

An analysis framework for hardware and software implementations with applications from cryptography

“…Within the context of application, the authors evaluated their approach by analyzing the hardware and software implementations in terms of the speed of processing floating point operations, bandwidth efficiency, data block size, communication time, etc. Lumbiarres-Lopez et al [12] implemented, within a co-design environment, a countermeasure against side-channel analysis attacks. The used application-specific metrics comprise the difference in change of input current over time and correlations between data and power consumption.…”

SD‐SHO: Security‐dominated finite state machine state assignment technique with a satisfactory level of hardware optimization

“…Thus, hardwaresecurity drives the attention of the researchers while designing such systems [6][7][8]. In literature [9], the side-channel attacks are proven as a substantial threat to the security of any secured-controller architecture. In a side-channel attack, the electromagnetic radiation or the power dissipation of the hardware equipment is analysed [10,11].…”