Publications
Articles
Summary: Mitigating side-channel leakage in cryptographic components is
a vital concern for developers working with embedded devices.
The conventional side-channel analysis demands substantial man-
ual effort for setup preparation and trace recording, rendering it
more intricate during the dynamic design phase, where software
alterations occur frequently. Additionally, identifying the specific
instruction(s) responsible for leakage has been hindered by limited
hardware descriptions and restricted access to process technology
information.
We introduce ABBY, an open-source side-channel leakage profil-
ing framework that targets the microarchitectural layer. Existing
solutions to characterize the microarchitectural layer are device-
specific and/or require extensive manual effort. ABBY’s main inno-
vation is data collection, which can then automatically characterize
the microarchitectural behaviour of a target device and has the
additional benefit of being extendable to other similar devices.
Using ABBY, we created two datasets that capture the interaction
of instructions for the ARM CORTEX-M0/M3 architecture. These
sets are the first to capture detailed information on the microarchi-
tectural layer. They can be used to explore various leakage models
suitable for creating side-channel leakage simulators. A prelim-
inary evaluation of a leakage model produced with our dataset
of real-world cryptographic implementations shows performance
comparable to state-of-the-art leakage simulators.