Improving the Design of secure systems by a Reduction Of Micro-architectural Effects on side-channeL attacks – IDROMEL

IDROMEL

Improving the Design of secure systems by a Reduction Of Micro-architectural Effects on side-channeL attacks

Context and objectives

The increasing adoption of cyber-physical and connected objects promises to address a large variety of societal challenges, from simplifying human communications (with legal authorities, public and private communications) to supporting next generation industry (so called Industry 4.0), smart cities and transportations. Since these computing objects become more and more integrated into our daily lives, their physical access is also becoming easier for malicious users.<br />In addition to usual networked systems’ threats, computations are vulnerable to a large range of physical attacks, which exploit some characteristics of the target system including both software and hardware. Among these, side-channel attacks (SCA)<br />can infer secret information from physical observations measured during the execution of sensitive computations. SCA typically exploit physical quantities such as electromagnetic signature and power consumption, behaviour of cache memories, and effects due to speculative execution. SCA have gained momentum with the increased use of cryptography because they represent, with fault injection attacks, the most effective way to break implementations of cryptography. SCA based on power and electromagnetic observations are particularly harmful because they have been successfully applied to many different<br />kinds of secured computations.<br /><br />To ease the heavy and costly hardening process, several automated techniques have been proposed to either analyse or protect software or hardware implementations. These techniques rely on an abstraction model of the target architecture and the potential source of leakage (e.g. source code or assembly level) that is simple enough to keep them tractable. However, the lack of precision of such models and the need to better model the target implementation has been recently highlighted: hardened systems are vulnerable to side-channel attacks due to leakage at the micro-architecture layer.<br />As an example, memory accesses, internal pipeline buffers, registers’ rewriting and the difference of propagation delays through the combinatorial logic (i.e. glitches) are now known to produce observable side-effects.<br /><br />The IDROMEL is a collaborative project between Arm, CEA, IRISA, LAAS and SU which aims to contribute to the design of secure systems against side-channel attacks based on power and electromagnetic observations, for a wide range of computing systems, from cost-effective ones implemented in IoT devices to more complex architectures commonly integrated into mobile phones. IDROMEL will investigates the impact of the processor micro-architecture on power and electromagnetic side-channel attacks as a key concern for the design of secure systems. The<br />objective of the project is to provide security assessments and automated security tools that take into account the target micro-architecture, as well as to design new processors that integrate hardware countermeasures.