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 $1 M$ encryptions, with $67\%$ energy efficiency and $1.23\times$ area overhead compared to the unprotected AES.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
- 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
-
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} }