Repository logo

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
  1. Home
  2. Academic and Research Output
  3. Journal articles
  4. An Architecture-Independent Instruction Shuffler to Protect against Side-Channel Attacks
 
research article

An Architecture-Independent Instruction Shuffler to Protect against Side-Channel Attacks

Bayrak, Ali Galip  
•
Velickovic, Nikola  
•
Ienne, Paolo  
Show more
2012
Acm Transactions On Architecture And Code Optimization

Embedded cryptographic systems, such as smart cards, require secure implementations that are robust to a variety of low-level attacks. Side-Channel Attacks (SCA) exploit the information such as power consumption, electromagnetic radiation and acoustic leaking through the device to uncover the secret information. Attackers can mount successful attacks with very modest resources in a short time period. Therefore, many methods have been proposed to increase the security against SCA. Randomizing the execution order of the instructions that are independent, i.e., random shuffling, is one of the most popular among them. Implementing instruction shuffling in software is either implementation specific or has a significant performance or code size overhead. To overcome these problems, we propose in this work a generic custom hardware unit to implement random instruction shuffling as an extension to existing processors. The unit operates between the CPU and the instruction cache (or memory, if no cache exists), without any modification to these components. Both true and pseudo random number generators are used to dynamically and locally provide the shuffling sequence. The unit is mainly designed for in-order processors, since the embedded devices subject to these kind of attacks use simple in-order processors. More advanced processors (e.g., superscalar, VLIW or EPIC processors) are already more resistant to these attacks because of their built-in ILP and wide word size. Our experiments on two different soft in-order processor cores, i.e., OpenRISC and MicroBlaze, implemented on FPGA show that the proposed unit could increase the security drastically with very modest resource overhead. With around 2% area, 1.5% power and no performance overhead, the shuffler increases the effort to mount a successful power analysis attack on AES software implementation over 360 times.

  • Details
  • Metrics
Type
research article
DOI
10.1145/2086696.2086699
Web of Science ID

WOS:000299995000003

Author(s)
Bayrak, Ali Galip  
Velickovic, Nikola  
Ienne, Paolo  
Burleson, Wayne
Date Issued

2012

Published in
Acm Transactions On Architecture And Code Optimization
Volume

8

Issue

4

Start page

20

Subjects

Design

•

Security

•

Performance

•

Side-channel attacks

•

instruction shuffler

•

random permutation generation

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LAP  
Available on Infoscience
March 8, 2012
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/78541
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
  • Contact
  • infoscience@epfl.ch

  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on LinkedIn
  • Follow us on X
  • Follow us on Youtube
AccessibilityLegal noticePrivacy policyCookie settingsEnd User AgreementGet helpFeedback

Infoscience is a service managed and provided by the Library and IT Services of EPFL. © EPFL, tous droits réservés