Investigating Multi-Thread Utilization as a Software Defence Mechanism Against Side Channel Attacks

Frieslaar, Ibraheem; Irwin, Barry

doi:10.1145/3015166.3015176

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Hitherto the research community has focused on SCA attacks based on smartcards, RFID tags, FPGAs and microcontrollers, particularly by analysing electromagnetic (EM) emissions [11,24,25]. In more recent years the research community began to target the vulnerabilities of high powered devices such as laptops and smartphones to SCA attacks [26][27][28].…”

Section: Electromagnetic Attacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This section will discuss multi-threading techniques and approaches that this research has identified, but which are commonly utilised to increase the run-time execution of a program as a potential solution for a software based countermeasures to mitigate SCA attacks. This research has selected a multi-threading approach as it has been demonstrated in previous work that a multi-threading solution outperforms known software based countermeasures [25,35,36].…”

Section: Multi-threading As a Software Countermeasurementioning

confidence: 99%

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Developing an Electromagnetic Noise Generator to Protect a Raspberry PI from Side Channel Analysis

Frieslaar

Irwin

2018

SAIEE Afr. Res. J.

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This research investigates the Electromagnetic (EM) side channel leakage of a Raspberry Pi 2 B+. An evaluation is performed on the EM leakage as the device executes the AES-128 cryptographic algorithm contained in the libcrypto++ library in a threaded environment. Four multi-threaded implementations are evaluated. These implementations are Portable Operating System Interface Threads, C++11 threads, Threading Building Blocks, and OpenMP threads. It is demonstrated that the various thread techniques have distinct variations in frequency and shape as EM emanations are leaked from the Raspberry Pi. It is demonstrated that the AES-128 cryptographic implementation within the libcrypto++ library on a Raspberry Pi is vulnerable to Side Channel Analysis (SCA) attacks. The cryptographic process was seen visibly within the EM spectrum and the data for this process was extracted where digital filtering techniques was applied to the signal. The resultant data was utilised in the Differential Electromagnetic Analysis (DEMA) attack and the results revealed 16 sub-keys that are required to recover the full AES-128 secret key. Based on this discovery, this research introduced a multi-threading approach with the utilisation of Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) to serve as a software based countermeasure to mitigate SCA attacks. The proposed countermeasure known as the FRIES noise generator executed as a Daemon and generated EM noise that was able to hide the cryptographic implementations and prevent the DEMA attack and other statistical analysis.

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