R-STELLAR: A Resilient Synthesizable Signature Attenuation SCA Protection on AES-256 with built-in Attack-on-Countermeasure Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ghosh, Archisman, Seo, Dong-Hyun, Das, Debayan, Ghosh, Santosh, Sen, Shreyas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ghosh, Archisman
Seo, Dong-Hyun
Das, Debayan
Ghosh, Santosh
Sen, Shreyas
author_facet Ghosh, Archisman
Seo, Dong-Hyun
Das, Debayan
Ghosh, Santosh
Sen, Shreyas
contents Side channel attacks (SCAs) remain a significant threat to the security of cryptographic systems in modern embedded devices. Even mathematically secure cryptographic algorithms, when implemented in hardware, inadvertently leak information through physical side channel signatures such as power consumption, electromagnetic (EM) radiation, light emissions, and acoustic emanations. Exploiting these side channels significantly reduces the search space of the attacker. In recent years, physical countermeasures have significantly increased the minimum traces to disclosure (MTD) to 1 billion. Among them, signature attenuation is the first method to achieve this mark. Signature attenuation often relies on analog techniques, and digital signature attenuation reduces MTD to 20 million, requiring additional methods for high resilience. We focus on improving the digital signature attenuation by an order of magnitude (MTD 200M). Additionally, we explore possible attacks against signature attenuation countermeasure. We introduce a Voltage drop Linear region Biasing (VLB) attack technique that reduces the MTD to over 2000 times less than the previous threshold. This is the first known attack against a physical side-channel attack (SCA) countermeasure. We have implemented an attack detector with a response time of 0.8 milliseconds to detect such attacks, limiting SCA leakage window to sub-ms, which is insufficient for a successful attack.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_12021
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle R-STELLAR: A Resilient Synthesizable Signature Attenuation SCA Protection on AES-256 with built-in Attack-on-Countermeasure Detection
Ghosh, Archisman
Seo, Dong-Hyun
Das, Debayan
Ghosh, Santosh
Sen, Shreyas
Cryptography and Security
Signal Processing
Side channel attacks (SCAs) remain a significant threat to the security of cryptographic systems in modern embedded devices. Even mathematically secure cryptographic algorithms, when implemented in hardware, inadvertently leak information through physical side channel signatures such as power consumption, electromagnetic (EM) radiation, light emissions, and acoustic emanations. Exploiting these side channels significantly reduces the search space of the attacker. In recent years, physical countermeasures have significantly increased the minimum traces to disclosure (MTD) to 1 billion. Among them, signature attenuation is the first method to achieve this mark. Signature attenuation often relies on analog techniques, and digital signature attenuation reduces MTD to 20 million, requiring additional methods for high resilience. We focus on improving the digital signature attenuation by an order of magnitude (MTD 200M). Additionally, we explore possible attacks against signature attenuation countermeasure. We introduce a Voltage drop Linear region Biasing (VLB) attack technique that reduces the MTD to over 2000 times less than the previous threshold. This is the first known attack against a physical side-channel attack (SCA) countermeasure. We have implemented an attack detector with a response time of 0.8 milliseconds to detect such attacks, limiting SCA leakage window to sub-ms, which is insufficient for a successful attack.
title R-STELLAR: A Resilient Synthesizable Signature Attenuation SCA Protection on AES-256 with built-in Attack-on-Countermeasure Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12021