International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 20 July 2015

Pei Luo, Liwei Zhang, Yunsi Fei, A. Adam Ding
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Side-channel attacks have been a real threat against many critical embedded systems that rely on cryptographic algorithms as their security engine. A commonly used algorithmic countermeasure, random masking, incurs large execution delay and resource overhead. The other countermeasure, operation shuffling or permutation, can mitigate side-channel leakage effectively with minimal overhead. In this paper, we target utilizing the independence among operations in cryptographic algorithms and randomizing their execution order. We design a tool to automatically detect such independence between statements at the source code level and devise an algorithm for automatic operation shuffling. We test our algorithm on the new SHA3 standard, Keccak. Results show that the tool has effectively implemented operation-shuffling to reduce the side-channel leakage significantly, and therefore can guide automatic secure cryptographic software implementations against differential power analysis attacks.

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