Articles

ABBY: Automating the creation of transition-based leakage models
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.

Thesis

Technical Reports