International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 23 February 2016

Souvik Sonar, Debapriya Basu Roy, Rajat Subhra Chakraborty, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
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Besides security against classical cryptanalysis, its important for cryptographic implementations to have sucient robustness against side-channel attacks. Many countermeasures have been proposed to thwart side channel attacks, especially power trace measurement based side channel attacks. Additionally, researchers have proposed several evaluation metrics to evaluate side channel security of crypto-system. However, evaluation of any crypto-system is done during the testing phase and is not part of the actual hardware. In our approach, we propose to implement such evaluation metrics on-chip for run-time side channel vulnerability estimation of a cryptosystem. The objective is to create a watchdog on the hardware which will monitor the side channel leakage of the device, and will alert the user if that leakage crosses a pre-determined threshold, beyond which the system might be considered vulnerable. Once such alert signal is activated, proactive countermeasures can be activated either at the device level or at the protocol level, to prevent the impending side channel attack. A FPGA based prototype designed by us show low hardware overhead, and is an e ective option that avoids the use of bulky and inconvenient on- eld measurement setup.
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