Use of Simulators for Side-Channel Analysis

Side-channel attacks are among the most powerful and cost-effective attacks on cryptographic systems. Simulators that are developed for side-channel analysis are very useful for preliminary analysis of new schemes, in depth analysis of existing schemes as well as for analysis of products onearly sta...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2017 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW) pp. 104 - 112
Main Authors Veshchikov, Nikita, Guilley, Sylvain
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.04.2017
Subjects
AES
Algorithm design and analysis
analysis tools
Cryptography
DPA Contest
Hardware
masking
Microcontrollers
power analysis
Power demand
Side-channel attacs
simulators
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Summary:Side-channel attacks are among the most powerful and cost-effective attacks on cryptographic systems. Simulators that are developed for side-channel analysis are very useful for preliminary analysis of new schemes, in depth analysis of existing schemes as well as for analysis of products onearly stages of development. The contribution of this paper is three-fold. We present a first survey of existing simulators that were build for side-channel analysis. We present a new open-source simulator SAVRASCA that can generate simulated power traces based on compiled binary files for many popular AVR microcontrollers. We show how to use our simulator onthe example of DPA Contest 4 and we find a new vulnerability that allows an attacker to mount a differential power analysis (or even simple electromagnetic analysis) attack on the scheme. Our simulator can be used during development of new products in order to test their resistance against side-channel analysis. We also focus the attention of readers on questions ofwhy and how simulators are useful in this domain and try to highlight main issues related to simulators that were developed by the community.
DOI:10.1109/EuroSPW.2017.59