New Paper accepted at DATE 2021 “Automated Masking of Software Implementations on Industrial Microcontrollers”

by Arnold Abromeit, Florian Bache, Leon A. Becker, Marc Gourjon, Tim Güneysu, Sabrina Jorn, Amir Moradi, Maximilian Orlt, Falk Schellenberg

2021/01/06

Physical side-channel attacks threaten the security of exposed embedded devices, such as microcontrollers. Dedicated countermeasures, like masking, are necessary to prevent these powerful attacks.

However, a gap between well-studied leakage models and observed leakage on real devices makes the application of these countermeasures non-trivial. This work provides a gadget-based concept to automated masking covering practically relevant leakage models to achieve security on real-world devices. We realize this concept with a fully automated compiler that transforms unprotected microcontroller-implementations of cryptographic primitives into masked executables, capable of being executed on the target device.

In a case study, we apply our approach to a bitsliced LED implementation and perform a TVLA-based security evaluation of its core component: the PRESENT s-box.