The threats of physical side-channel attacks and their countermeasures have been widely researched. Most physical side-channel attacks rely on the unavoidable influence of computation or storage on current consumption or voltage drop on a chip. Such data-dependent influence can be exploited by, for instance, power or electromagnetic analysis. In this work, we introduce a novel non-invasive physical side-channel attack, which exploits the data-dependent changes in the impedance of the chip. Our attack relies on the fact that the temporarily stored contents in registers alter the physical characteristics of the circuit, which results in changes in the die's impedance. To sense such impedance variations, we deploy a well-known RF/microwave method called scattering parameter analysis, in which we inject sine wave signals with high frequencies into the system's power distribution network (PDN) and measure the echo of the signals. We demonstrate that according to the content bits and physical location of a register, the reflected signal is modulated differently at various frequency points enabling the simultaneous and independent probing of individual registers. Such side-channel leakage challenges the t-probing security model assumption used in masking, which is a prominent side-channel countermeasure. To validate our claims, we mount non-profiled and profiled impedance analysis attacks on hardware implementations of unprotected and high-order masked AES. We show that in the case of the profiled attack, only a single trace is required to recover the secret key. Finally, we discuss how a specific class of hiding countermeasures might be effective against impedance leakage.
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Key Update Countermeasure for Correlation-Based Side-Channel Attacks
Side-channel analysis is a non-invasive form of attack that reveals the secret key of the cryptographic circuit by analyzing the leaked physical information. The traditional brute-force and cryptanalysis attacks target the weakness in the encryption algorithm, whereas side-channel attacks use statistical models such as differential analysis and correlation analysis on the leaked information gained from the cryptographic device during the run-time. As a non-invasive and passive attack, the side-channel attack brings a lot of difficulties for detection and defense. In this work, we propose a key update scheme
as a countermeasure for power and electromagnetic analysis-based attacks on the cryptographic device. The proposed countermeasure utilizes a secure coprocessor to provide secure key generation and storage in a trusted environment. The experimental results show that the proposed key update scheme can mitigate side-channel attacks significantly.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1814420
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10169992
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of hardware and systems security
- ISSN:
- 2509-3436
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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- The DOI is not currently available.
