Highly secure and low overhead countermeasures against side-channel attacks

Abstract

Side-Channel Attack (SCA) is an emerging technique to reveal the secret key of crypto-devices by analyzing the processed-data and their Physical Leakage Information (PLI). The crypto-devices refer to electronic devices such as smartphone, smartcards, wearable devices, and Internet of Things (IoT) implemented with cryptographic algorithms. The processed-data can either be the plaintext or the ciphertext. The PLI includes the power dissipation, electromagnetic interference, acoustic, temperature, and timing information of the crypto-device. The Correlation based Attack (CbA) is the most commonly used SCA. In the CbA, the correlation between the processed-data and the PLI is analyzed to reveal the secret key. In contrast, to secure the secret key against the CbA, countermeasure techniques can be applied to reduce the correlation between the processed-data and the PLI.