Energy Efficient Obfuscation of Side-Channel Leakage for Preventing Side-Channel Attacks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an energy-efficient method for injecting artificial noise into cryptographic devices to prevent side-channel attacks by modeling leakage as a communication channel and optimizing noise based on channel capacity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, energy-efficient noise injection scheme that exploits leakage sparsity and models side-channel leakage as a communication channel to minimize information leakage.

Findings

Effective noise injection reduces side-channel information leakage.

Energy-efficient design maintains security with lower power consumption.

Experimental validation confirms scheme's effectiveness.

Abstract

Side-channel attacks (SCAs), which infer secret information (for example secret keys) by exploiting information that leaks from the implementation (such as power consumption), have been shown to be a non-negligible threat to modern cryptographic implementations and devices in recent years. Hence, how to prevent side-channel attacks on cryptographic devices has become an important problem. One of the widely used countermeasures to against power SCAs is the injection of random noise sequences into the raw leakage traces. However, the indiscriminate injection of random noise can lead to significant increases in energy consumption in device, and ways must be found to reduce the amount of energy in noise generation while keeping the side-channel invisible. In this paper, we propose an optimal energy-efficient design for artificial noise generation to prevent side-channel attacks. This approach exploits the sparsity among the leakage traces. We model the side-channel as a communication channel, which allows us to use channel capacity to measure the mutual information between the secret and the leakage traces. For a given energy budget in the noise generation, we obtain the optimal design of the artificial noise injection by solving the side-channel's channel capacity minimization problem. The experimental results also validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.