Paper 2018/620

STELLAR: A Generic EM Side-Channel Attack Protection through Ground-Up Root-cause Analysis

Debayan Das, Mayukh Nath, Baibhab Chatterjee, Santosh Ghosh, and Shreyas Sen

Abstract

The threat of side-channels is becoming increasingly prominent for resource-constrained internet-connected devices. While numerous power side-channel countermeasures have been proposed, a promising approach to protect the non-invasive electromagnetic side-channel attacks has been relatively scarce. Today's availability of high-resolution electromagnetic (EM) probes mandates the need for a low-overhead solution to protect EM side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks. This work, for the first time, performs a white-box analysis to root-cause the origin of the EM leakage from an integrated circuit. System-level EM simulations with Intel 32 nm CMOS technology interconnect stack, as an example, reveals that the EM leakage from metals above layer 8 can be detected by an external non-invasive attacker with the commercially available state-of-the-art EM probes. Equipped with this `white-box' understanding, this work proposes \textit{STELLAR}: Signature aTtenuation Embedded CRYPTO with Low-Level metAl Routing, which is a two-stage solution to eliminate the critical signal radiation from the higher-level metal layers. Firstly, we propose routing of the entire cryptographic cores power traces using the local lower-level metal layers, whose leakage cannot be picked up by an external attacker. Then, the entire crypto IP is embedded within a Signature Attenuation Hardware (SAH) which in turn suppresses the critical encryption signature before it routes the current signature to the highly radiating top-level metal layers. System-level implementation of the STELLAR hardware with local lower-level metal routing in TSMC 65 nm CMOS technology, with an AES-128 encryption engine (as an example cryptographic block) operating at 40 MHz, shows that the system remains secure against EM SCA attack even after encryptions, with energy efficiency and area overhead compared to the unprotected AES.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. IEEE HOST 2019
Keywords
EM Side-channel attackGeneric countermeasureGround-up EM Leakage ModelingCryptographic hardwareSTELLARSignature Attenuation Hardware
Contact author(s)
das60 @ purdue edu
History
2019-03-13: last of 8 revisions
2018-06-22: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2018/620
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/620,
      author = {Debayan Das and Mayukh Nath and Baibhab Chatterjee and Santosh Ghosh and Shreyas Sen},
      title = {{STELLAR}: A Generic {EM} Side-Channel Attack Protection through Ground-Up Root-cause Analysis},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/620},
      year = {2018},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/620}
}
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