Abstract
Embedded systems are often used in security-critical scenarios where physical access of an adversary cannot be prevented. An attacker with unrestricted physical access to an embedded device could thus use observation-based attacks like power analysis or chip probing techniques to extract chip-internal secrets. In this work, we investigate how to counteract first-order passive physical attacks on an embedded microcontroller. In particular, we focus on the protection of the central point of data processing in the microcontroller design—the arithmetic logic unit (ALU)—with the provably secure threshold implementation (TI) masking scheme. Our results show that the amount of required fresh random bits—a problem many masked implementations suffer from—can be reduced to only one bit per ALU access and clock cycle. The total chip area overhead for implementing the whole microcontroller of our case study as a three-share TI is about a factor of 2.8.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Barak, B., Goldreich, O., Impagliazzo, R., Rudich, S., Sahai, A., Vadhan, S., Yang, K.: On the (Im)Possibility of Obfuscating Programs. J. ACM 6, 6:1–6:48 (2012)
Bilgin, B., Daemen, J., Nikov, V., Nikova, S., Rijmen, V., Assche, G.V.: Efficient and first-order DPA resistant implementations of keccak. In: Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications - 12th International Conference, CARDIS 2013, Berlin, Germany, November 27–29, Revised Selected Papers, pp. 187–199 (2013)
Bilgin, B., Gierlichs, B., Nikova, S., Nikov, V., Rijmen, V.: Higher-order threshold implementations. In: Sarkar, P., Iwata, T. (eds.) ASIACRYPT 2014, Part II. LNCS, vol. 8874, pp. 326–343. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Bilgin, B., Nikova, S., Nikov, V., Rijmen, V., Stütz, G.: Threshold Implementations of All 3 ×3 and 4 ×4 S-Boxes. In: Prouff, E., Schaumont, P. (eds.) CHES 2012. LNCS, vol. 7428, pp. 76–91. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Instruments, T.: FRAM FAQs (2014) (accessed February 10, 2015)
Ishai, Y., Sahai, A., Wagner, D.: Private circuits: Securing hardware against probing attacks. In: Boneh, D. (ed.) CRYPTO 2003. LNCS, vol. 2729, pp. 463–481. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Käsper, E., Schwabe, P.: Faster and timing-attack resistant AES-GCM. In: Clavier, C., Gaj, K. (eds.) CHES 2009. LNCS, vol. 5747, pp. 1–17. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Kocher, P.C., Jaffe, J., Jun, B.: Differential power analysis. In: Wiener, M. (ed.) CRYPTO 1999. LNCS, vol. 1666, pp. 388–397. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Moradi, A., Poschmann, A., Ling, S., Paar, C., Wang, H.: Pushing the limits: a very compact and a threshold implementation of AES. In: Paterson, K.G. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2011. LNCS, vol. 6632, pp. 69–88. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Nikova, S., Rechberger, C., Rijmen, V.: Threshold implementations against side-channel attacks and glitches. In: Ning, P., Qing, S., Li, N. (eds.) ICICS 2006. LNCS, vol. 4307, pp. 529–545. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Nikova, S., Rijmen, V., Schläffer, M.: Secure Hardware Implementation of Nonlinear Functions in the Presence of Glitches. Journal of Cryptology 24(2), 292–321 (2011)
Poschmann, A., Moradi, A., Khoo, K., Lim, C.-W., Wang, H., Ling, S.: Side-Channel Resistant Crypto for Less than 2, 300 GE. J. Cryptology 24, 322–345 (2011)
Quisquater, J.-J., Samyde, D.: ElectroMagnetic analysis (EMA): measures and counter-measures for smart cards. In: Attali, S., Jensen, T. (eds.) E-smart 2001. LNCS, vol. 2140, pp. 200–210. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Schneider, T., Moradi, A., Gneysu, T.: Arithmetic Addition over Boolean Masking - Towards First- and Second-Order Resistance in Hardware. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2015/066 (2015)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gross, H. (2015). Sharing is Caring—On the Protection of Arithmetic Logic Units against Passive Physical Attacks. In: Mangard, S., Schaumont, P. (eds) Radio Frequency Identification. RFIDSec 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9440. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24837-0_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24837-0_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24836-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24837-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)