Paper 2024/1904

An Open Source Ecosystem for Implementation Security Testing

Abstract

Implementation-security vulnerabilities such as the power-based side-channel leakage and fault-injection sensitivity of a secure chip are hard to verify because of the sophistication of the measurement setup, as well as the need to generalize the adversary into a test procedure. While the literature has proposed a wide range of vulnerability metrics to test the correctness of a secure implementation, it is still up to the subject-matter expert to map these concepts into a working and reliable test procedure. Recently, we investigated the benefits of using an open-source implementation security testing environment called Chipwhisperer. The open-source and low-cost nature of the Chipwhisperer hardware and software has resulted in the adoption of thousands of testing kits throughout academia and industry, turning the testkit into a baseline for implementation security testing. We investigate the use cases for the Chipwhisperer hardware and software, and we evaluate the feasibility of an open-source ecosystem for implementation security testing. In addition to the open-source hardware and firmware, an ecosystem also considers broader community benefits such as re-usability, sustainability, and governance.