Work in Progress: Thwarting Timing Attacks in Microcontrollers using Fine-grained Hardware Protections

Abstract

Timing side-channels are an identified threat for security critical software. Existing countermeasures have a cost either on the hardware requirements or execution time. We focus on low-cost microcontrollers that have a very low computational capacity. Although these processors do not feature out-of-order execution or speculation, they remain vulnerable to timing attacks exploiting the varying latencies of ALU operations or memory accesses.We propose to augment the RISC-V ISA with security primitives that have a guaranteed timing behavior. These primitives allow constant time ALU operations and memory accesses that do not alter the state of the cache. Our approach has a low overhead in terms of hardware cost, binary code size, and execution time both for the constant time secure program and other programs running concurrently on the same hardware.