Software mitigations to hedge AES against cache-based software side channel vulnerabilities.
Ernie Brickell, Gary Graunke, Michael Neve, Jean‐Pierre Seifert · 2006
Hardware side channel vulnerabilities have been studied for many years in embedded silicon-security arena including SmartCards, SetTop-boxes, etc. However, because various recent security activities have goals of improving the software isolation properties of PC platforms, software side channels have become a subject of interest. Recent publications discussed cache-based software side channel vulnerabilities of AES and RSA. Thus, following the classical approach --- a new side channel vulnerability opens a new mitigation research path --- this paper starts to investigate e#cient mitigations to protect AES-software against side channel vulnerabilities. First, we will present several mitigation strategies to harden existing AES software against cache-based software side channel attacks and analyze their theoretical protection.