System side-channel leakage emulation for HW/SW security coverification of MPSoCs

Abstract

During recent years a tremendous number of embedded systems has been introduced into every person's house-hold. Such systems cannot only be found inside non-critical applications like entertainment devices but also in safety or security critical implementations like smart-cards. The increasing complexity leads to the introduction of several different co-design techniques to enable the parallel design of the system's hardware and software. Especially concerning security evaluation procedures this may raise a problem of trust between the manufacturer of the hardware and the software if both are different entities. To enable a bridge between these two worlds, simulation and emulation-based approaches have been shown in literature and industry to provide abstracted information about fault-attack effects to the software developer. However, no fast and cost-effective approach is available to provide a metric about how much of a given secret is leaking from the device to its environment. Therefore, this paper proposes such a metric and an emulation-based methodology to enable an early estimation of side-channel leakage to a possible adversary. The effectiveness of our approach is shown using a common available system-on-chip implementation using an open-source standard-cell library for characterization and a FPGA-based emulation platform for demonstration.