Published: April 23, 2019
Author(s)
Miao He (University of Florida), Jungmin Park (University of Florida), Adib Nahiyan (University of Florida), Apostol Vassilev (NIST), Yier Jin (University of Florida), Mark Tehranipoor (University of Florida)
Conference
Name: IEEE VLSI Test Symposium 2019
Dates: April 23-25, 2019
Location: Monterey, CA
Citation: 2019 IEEE 37th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS), vol. 1, pp. 1-6
Power side-channel attacks (SCAs) have become a major concern to the security community due to their noninvasive feature, low-cost, and effectiveness in extracting secret information from hardware implementation of crypto algorithms. Therefore, it is imperative to evaluate if the hardware is vulnerable to SCAs during its design and validation stages. Currently, however, there is little known effort in evaluating the vulnerability of a hardware to SCAs at early design stage. In this paper, we propose, for the first time, an automated framework, named RTL-PSC, for power side-channel leakage assessment of hardware crypto designs at register-transfer level (RTL) with built-in evaluation metrics. RTL-PSC first estimates power profile of a hardware design using functional simulation at RTL. Then it utilizes the evaluation metrics, comprising of KL divergence metric and the success rate (SR) metric based on maximum likelihood estimation to perform power side-channel leakage (PSC) vulnerability assessment at RTL. We analyze Galois-Field (GF) and Look-up Table (LUT) based AES designs using RTL-PSC and validate its effectiveness and accuracy through both gate-level simulation and FPGA results. RTL-PSC is also capable of identifying blocks inside the design that contribute the most to the PSC vulnerability which can be used for efficient countermeasure implementation.
Power side-channel attacks (SCAs) have become a major concern to the security community due to their noninvasive feature, low-cost, and effectiveness in extracting secret information from hardware implementation of crypto algorithms. Therefore, it is imperative to evaluate if the hardware is...
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Power side-channel attacks (SCAs) have become a major concern to the security community due to their noninvasive feature, low-cost, and effectiveness in extracting secret information from hardware implementation of crypto algorithms. Therefore, it is imperative to evaluate if the hardware is vulnerable to SCAs during its design and validation stages. Currently, however, there is little known effort in evaluating the vulnerability of a hardware to SCAs at early design stage. In this paper, we propose, for the first time, an automated framework, named RTL-PSC, for power side-channel leakage assessment of hardware crypto designs at register-transfer level (RTL) with built-in evaluation metrics. RTL-PSC first estimates power profile of a hardware design using functional simulation at RTL. Then it utilizes the evaluation metrics, comprising of KL divergence metric and the success rate (SR) metric based on maximum likelihood estimation to perform power side-channel leakage (PSC) vulnerability assessment at RTL. We analyze Galois-Field (GF) and Look-up Table (LUT) based AES designs using RTL-PSC and validate its effectiveness and accuracy through both gate-level simulation and FPGA results. RTL-PSC is also capable of identifying blocks inside the design that contribute the most to the PSC vulnerability which can be used for efficient countermeasure implementation.
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Keywords
leakage assessment; Register-Transfer Level; side-channel attacks; vulnerability evaluation
Control Families
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