Paper 2021/1569

ABBY: Automating leakage modeling for side-channels analysis

Abstract

We introduce ABBY, an open-source side-channel leakage profiling framework that targets the microarchitectural layer. Existing solutions to characterize the microarchitectural layer are device-specific and require extensive manual effort. The main innovation of ABBY is the collection of data, which can automatically characterize the microarchitecture of a target device and has the additional benefit of being scalable. Using ABBY, we create two sets of data which capture the interaction of instructions for the ARM CORTEX-M0/M3 architecture. These sets are the first to capture detailed information on the microarchitectural layer. They can be used to explore various leakage models suitable for creating sidechannel leakage simulators. A preliminary evaluation of a leakage model produced with our dataset of real-world cryptographic implementations shows performance comparable to state-of-the-art leakage simulators.