Paper 2019/1445

Rosita: Towards Automatic Elimination of Power-Analysis Leakage in Ciphers

Madura A Shelton and Niels Samwel and Lejla Batina and Francesco Regazzoni and Markus Wagner and Yuval Yarom

Abstract

Since their introduction over two decades ago, physical side-channel attacks have presented a serious security threat. While many ciphers' implementations employ masking techniques to protect against such attacks, they often leak secret information due to unintended interactions in the hardware. We present Rosita, a code rewrite engine that uses a leakage emulator which we amended to correctly emulate the micro-architecture of a target system. We use Rosita to automatically protect masked implementations of AES and Xoodoo and show the absence of observable leakage at only a 25% penalty to the performance.