Paper 2024/438

EFFLUX-F2: A High Performance Hardware Security Evaluation Board

Abstract

Side-channel analysis has become a cornerstone of modern hardware security evaluation for cryptographic accelerators. Recently, these techniques are also being applied in fields such as AI and Machine Learning to investigate possible threats. Security evaluations are reliant on standard test setups including commercial and open-source evaluation boards such as, SASEBO/SAKURA and ChipWhisperer. However, with shrinking design footprints and overlapping tasks on the same platforms, the quality of the side channel information as well as the speed of data capture can significantly influence security assessment. In this work, we designed EFFLUX-F2, a hardware security evaluation board to improve the quality and speed of side-channel information capture. We also designed a measurement setup to benchmark the signal differences between target boards. Multiple experimental evaluations like noise analysis, CPA and TVLA performed on EFFLUX-F2 and competing evaluation boards showcase the significant superiority of our design in all aspects.