Towards secure cryptographic software implementation against side-channel power analysis attacks

Abstract

Side-channel attacks have been a real threat against many embedded cryptographic systems. A commonly used algorithmic countermeasure, random masking, incurs large execution delay and resource overhead. The other countermeasure, operation shuffling or permutation, can mitigate side-channel leakage effectively with minimal overhead. In this paper, we target automatically implementing operation shuffling in cryptographic algorithms to resist against side-channel power analysis attacks. We design a tool to detect independence among statements at the source code level and devise an algorithm for automatic operation shuffling. We test our algorithm on the new SHA3 standard, Keccak. Results show that the tool effectively implements operation-shuffling to reduce the side-channel leakage significantly, and therefore can guide automatic secure cryptographic software implementations against differential power analysis attacks.