Side-Channel Watchdog: Run-Time Evaluation of Side-Channel Vulnerability in FPGA-Based Crypto-systems

Besides security against classical cryptanalysis, its important for cryptographic implementations to have sufficient 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...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: IACR
• Authors: Souvik Sonar, Debapriya Basu Roy, Rajat Subhra Chakraborty, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
• Keywords: Biometrics, IACR 2016