Side-channel watermarks for embedded software

Becker, Georg T.; Burleson, Wayne; Paar, Christof

doi:10.1109/newcas.2011.5981323

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Computation of the watermark and its energy trace is based on the clock cycle. Traces should be synchronized properly to avoid unwanted noise in the side-channel analysis [3].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications

Subramanian¹,

Rajeswari²

2019

Automatika

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Source code plagiarism has become a serious threat for the development of small scale embedded industries and also the violations of intellectual property right are a threat for the development of hardware system. There are many software solutions for comparing source codes, but they are often not realistic in the present scenario. Digital watermarking scheme is one of the possible solutions for this problem. A novel watermarking technique is employed so that it can be easily and reliably detected by special techniques. In this paper, verification methods are presented to detect software plagiarism in the embedded application software without the implemented source code. All the approaches use side-channel information obtained during the execution of the suspicious code. The primary method is passive, i.e. no previous modification of the original code is required. It determines that the Hamming weights of the executed instructions of the suspicious device are used and uses string matching algorithms for comparisons with a reference implementation. The other method inserts additional code fragments as a watermark that can be identified in the power consumption of the executed source code. Proposed approaches are robust against code-transformation attacks.

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“…Computation of the watermark and its energy trace is based on the clock cycle. Traces should be synchronized properly to avoid unwanted noise in the side-channel analysis [3].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications

Subramanian¹,

Rajeswari²

2019

Automatika

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“…Becker et al [11,10] propose to use side-channel leakage for watermark detection. It is built upon Differential Power Analysis (DPA) [16].…”

Section: Side-channel Watermarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Same as in other state of the art approaches, e.g., [10], our adversary model does not include compiler-based code transformations that require a decompiler for transforming the program code to a high-level programming language.…”

Section: Adversary Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fault-Channel Watermarks

Samarin

Skripnik

Lemke‐Rust

2016

Information Security Theory and Practice

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We introduce a new approach for securing intellectual property in embedded software implementations by using the response of an implementation to fault injections. In our approach, the implementation serves as its own watermark that is recorded through its fault effects. There is no additional code for the watermark. A simulator that maps the fault injections to the executed instructions aids an automated characterization of program code. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of our watermarking approach using an 8-bit ATMega163 microcontroller and several assembly implementations of AES encryption. The results show that our method is well-suited for detection of identical software copies. In addition, our method shows robust performance in detection of software copies with a large number of added dummy instructions.

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“…The power side-channel was used in [7] to transmit a signature in a way that can be decoded after sampling the power trace using a digital oscilloscope. An improvement of this approach was developed by [8], whose contribution was to hide the watermarking signal below the noise level, so that an adversary does not learn anything from recording the power trace, unless the watermark is made public. In an attempt to reduce the size of the leakage circuit that is used for transmitting the watermark over the power sidechannel, [9] presented a method that utilizes clock gating.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

IP core protection using voltage-controlled side-channel receivers

Samarin

Lemke‐Rust

Paar

2016

2016 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)

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This paper presents a new method for protecting netlist-based Intellectual Property (IP) cores in FPGAs by actively using voltage-controlled side-channel receivers. The receivers are realized by modulating the supply voltage of the chip, while at the same time detecting these changes from within the chip using a ring oscillator. The levels of the supply voltage can be determined by constantly monitoring the frequency of the ring oscillator.To prove authorship of an IP core, the verifier authenticates himself to the core over the voltage side-channel and sends commands that limit the core's functionality. By monitoring the regular outputs of the overall system, it is possible to detect illegitimately used cores after repeatedly turning them on and off. The working principle of our method is demonstrated by a case study, in which we protect several IP cores and place them on a Spartan 3 FPGA, and show the steps necessary for successful proof of ownership verification.

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Side-channel watermarks for embedded software

Cited by 8 publications

References 7 publications

Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications

Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications

Fault-Channel Watermarks

IP core protection using voltage-controlled side-channel receivers

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