Practical evaluation of masking software countermeasures on an IoT processor

Abstract

Implementing cryptography on Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, that is resilient against side channel analysis, has so far been a task only suitable for specialist software designers in interaction with access to a sophisticated testing facility. Recently a novel tool has been developed, ELMO, which offers the potential to enable non-specialist software developers to evaluate their code w.r.t. power analysis for a popular IoT processor. We explain a crucial extension of ELMO, which enables a user to test higher-order masking schemes much more efficiently than so far possible as well as improve the ease and speed of diagnosing masking errors.