Asymmetric Leakage from Multiplier and Collision-Based Single-Shot Side-Channel Attack

The single-shot collision attack on RSA proposed by Hanley et al. is studied focusing on the difference between two operands of multiplier. It is shown that how leakage from integer multiplier and long-integer multiplication algorithm can be asymmetric between two operands. The asymmetric leakage is verified with experiments on FPGA and micro-controller platforms. Moreover, we show an experimental result in which success and failure of the attack is determined by the order of operands. Therefore, designing operand order can be a cost-effective countermeasure. Meanwhile we also show a case in which a particular countermeasure becomes ineffective when the asymmetric leakage is considered. In addition to the above main contribution, an extension of the attack by Hanley et al. using the signal-processing technique of Big Mac Attack is presented

RSA Power Analysis Obfuscation: A Dynamic FPGA Architecture

The modular exponentiation operation used in popular public key encryption schemes, such as RSA, has been the focus of many side channel analysis (SCA) attacks in recent years. Current SCA attack countermeasures are largely static. Given sufficient signal-to-noise ratio and a number of power traces, static countermeasures can be defeated, as they merely attempt to hide the power consumption of the system under attack. This research develops a dynamic countermeasure which constantly varies the timing and power consumption of each operation, making correlation between traces more difficult than for static countermeasures. By randomizing the radix of encoding for Booth multiplication and randomizing the window size in exponentiation, this research produces a SCA countermeasure capable of increasing RSA SCA attack protection

Real time detection of cache-based side-channel attacks using hardware performance counters

Cache-based side-channel attacks are increasingly exposing the weaknesses of many cryptographic libraries and tools by showing that, even though the algorithms might be considered strong, their implementations often lead to unexpected behaviors that can be exploited to obtain sensitive data, usually encryption keys. In this study we analyze three methods to detect cache-based side-channel attacks in real time, preventing or limiting the amount of leaked information. We focus our efforts on detecting three attacks on the well-known OpenSSL library: one that targets AES, one that targets RSA and one that targets ECDSA. The first method is based on monitoring the involved processes and assumes the victim process is known. By collecting and correlating the monitored data we find out whether there exists an attacker and pinpoint it. The second method uses anomaly detection techniques and assumes the benign processes and their behavior are known. By treating the attacker as a potential anomaly we understand whether an attack is in progress and which process is performing it. The last method is based on employing a neural network, a machine learning technique, to profile the attacker and to be able to recognize when a process that behaves suspiciously like the attacker is running. All the three of them can successfully detect an attack in about one fifth of the time required to complete it. We could not experience the presence of false positives in our test environment and the overhead caused by the detection systems is negligible. We also analyze how the detection systems behave with a modified version of one ofthe spy processes. With some optimization we are confident these systems can be used in real world scenarios

Cross-core Microarchitectural Attacks and Countermeasures

In the last decade, multi-threaded systems and resource sharing have brought a number of technologies that facilitate our daily tasks in a way we never imagined. Among others, cloud computing has emerged to offer us powerful computational resources without having to physically acquire and install them, while smartphones have almost acquired the same importance desktop computers had a decade ago. This has only been possible thanks to the ever evolving performance optimization improvements made to modern microarchitectures that efficiently manage concurrent usage of hardware resources. One of the aforementioned optimizations is the usage of shared Last Level Caches (LLCs) to balance different CPU core loads and to maintain coherency between shared memory blocks utilized by different cores. The latter for instance has enabled concurrent execution of several processes in low RAM devices such as smartphones. Although efficient hardware resource sharing has become the de-facto model for several modern technologies, it also poses a major concern with respect to security. Some of the concurrently executed co-resident processes might in fact be malicious and try to take advantage of hardware proximity. New technologies usually claim to be secure by implementing sandboxing techniques and executing processes in isolated software environments, called Virtual Machines (VMs). However, the design of these isolated environments aims at preventing pure software- based attacks and usually does not consider hardware leakages. In fact, the malicious utilization of hardware resources as covert channels might have severe consequences to the privacy of the customers. Our work demonstrates that malicious customers of such technologies can utilize the LLC as the covert channel to obtain sensitive information from a co-resident victim. We show that the LLC is an attractive resource to be targeted by attackers, as it offers high resolution and, unlike previous microarchitectural attacks, does not require core-colocation. Particularly concerning are the cases in which cryptography is compromised, as it is the main component of every security solution. In this sense, the presented work does not only introduce three attack variants that can be applicable in different scenarios, but also demonstrates the ability to recover cryptographic keys (e.g. AES and RSA) and TLS session messages across VMs, bypassing sandboxing techniques. Finally, two countermeasures to prevent microarchitectural attacks in general and LLC attacks in particular from retrieving fine- grain information are presented. Unlike previously proposed countermeasures, ours do not add permanent overheads in the system but can be utilized as preemptive defenses. The first identifies leakages in cryptographic software that can potentially lead to key extraction, and thus, can be utilized by cryptographic code designers to ensure the sanity of their libraries before deployment. The second detects microarchitectural attacks embedded into innocent-looking binaries, preventing them from being posted in official application repositories that usually have the full trust of the customer

Horizontal Clustering Side-Channel Attacks on Embedded ECC Implementations (Extended Version)

Side-channel attacks are a threat to cryptographic algorithms running on embedded devices. Public-key cryptosystems, including elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), are particularly vulnerable because their private keys are usually long-term. Well known countermeasures like regularity, projective coordinates and scalar randomization, among others, are used to harden implementations against common side-channel attacks like DPA. Horizontal clustering attacks can theoretically overcome these countermeasures by attacking individual side-channel traces. In practice horizontal attacks have been applied to overcome protected ECC implementations on FPGAs. However, it has not been known yet whether such attacks can be applied to protected implementations working on embedded devices, especially in a non-profiled setting. In this paper we mount non-profiled horizontal clustering attacks on two protected implementations of the Montgomery Ladder on Curve25519 available in the µNaCl library targeting electromagnetic (EM) emanations. The first implementation performs the conditional swap (cswap) operation through arithmetic of field elements (cswap-arith), while the second does so by swapping the pointers (cswap-pointer). They run on a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4F core. Our best attack has success rates of 97.64% and 99.60% for cswap-arith and cswap-pointer, respectively. This means that at most 6 and 2 bits are incorrectly recovered, and therefore, a subsequent brute-force can fix them in reasonable time. Furthermore, our horizontal clustering framework used for the aforementioned attacks can be applied against other protected implementations

May the fourth be with you: a microarchitectural side channel attack on several real-world applications of Curve25519

Session D3: Logical Side ChannelsIn recent years, applications increasingly adopt security primitives designed with better countermeasures against side channel attacks. A concrete example is Libgcrypt’s implementation of ECDH encryption with Curve25519. The implementation employs the Montgomery ladder scalar-by-point multiplication, uses the unified, branchless Montgomery double-and-add formula and implements a constant-time argument swap within the ladder. However, Libgcrypt’s field arithmetic operations are not implemented in a constant-time side-channel-resistant fashion. Based on the secure design of Curve25519, users of the curve are advised that there is no need to perform validation of input points. In this work we demonstrate that when this recommendation is followed, the mathematical structure of Curve25519 facilitates the exploitation of side-channel weaknesses. We demonstrate the effect of this vulnerability on three software applications—encrypted git, email and messaging—that use Libgcrypt. In each case, we show how to craft malicious OpenPGP files that use the Curve25519 point of order 4 as a chosen ciphertext to the ECDH encryption scheme. We find that the resulting interactions of the point at infinity, order-2, and order-4 elements in the Montgomery ladder scalar-by-point multiplication routine create side channel leakage that allows us to recover the private key in as few as 11 attempts to access such malicious files.Daniel Genkin, Luke Valenta, Yuval Yaro

SoK: SCA-secure ECC in software – mission impossible?

This paper describes an ECC implementation computing the X25519 keyexchange protocol on the Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller. For providing protections against various side-channel and fault attacks we first review known attacks and countermeasures, then we provide software implementations that come with extensive mitigations, and finally we present a preliminary side-channel evaluation. To our best knowledge, this is the first public software claiming affordable protection against multiple classes of attacks that are motivated by distinct real-world application scenarios. We distinguish between X25519 with ephemeral keys and X25519 with static keys and show that the overhead to our baseline unprotected implementation is about 37% and 243%, respectively. While this might seem to be a high price to pay for security, we also show that even our (most protected) static implementation is at least as efficient as widely-deployed ECC cryptographic libraries, which offer much less protection

Fast Side-Channel Security Evaluation of ECC Implementations: Shortcut Formulas for Horizontal Side-channel Attacks against ECSM with the Montgomery ladder

Horizontal attacks are a suitable tool to evaluate the (nearly) worst-case side-channel security level of ECC implementations, due to the fact that they allow extracting a large amount of information from physical observations. Motivated by the difficulty of mounting such attacks and inspired by evaluation strategies for the security of symmetric cryptography implementations, we derive shortcut formulas to estimate the success rate of horizontal differential power analysis attacks against ECSM implementations, for efficient side-channel security evaluations. We then discuss the additional leakage assumptions that we exploit for this purpose, and provide experimental confirmation that the proposed tools lead to good predictions of the attacks\u27 success