Enabling Power-based Side-Channel Attack Simulation using Virtual Prototyping

Abstract:
In the modern more and more connected world, secure communication between devices is of upmost importance. Especially in the automotive field, the largely increasing inter- and intra-vehicle communication requires encryption to ensure safe driving and confidentiality of user data. Mathematically secure encryption algorithms have been developed. But in practice, being mathematically secure is not enough. Execution on real hardware leads to physical emanations like power, electromagnetic or timing variations. Side-channel attacks exploit these emanations to find out secrets, like encryption keys. Hence, for secure communication, robustness against side-channel attacks is mandatory. Evaluating robustness of cryptography algorithms and of countermeasures against side-channel attacks needs encryption hardware. Additionally, sometimes equipment is required, e.g. to measure power or electromagnetic emanations. But both encryption hardware and equipment are not always available. Virtual Prototying, which enables high-speed full-system simulation even before RTL is available, can perfectly fulfill this gap. In our work we focus on power side-channel attacks. We enable their simulation in the well-known simulator GEM5 using power modellings and extend GEM5 with SystemC/TLM. We present in this paper an outline of our work and first positive results. Our work allows evaluation of side-channel attack robustness even during hardware design, when the hardware is not available. Besides improving speed of software development, this also allows to improve the hardware immediately, which saves time and costs.