Energy Efficient Obfuscation of Side-Channel Leakage for Preventing Side-Channel Attacks
Shan Jin, Minghua Xu, Yiwei Cai · 2024
How to efficiently prevent side-channel attacks (SCAs) on cryptographic implementations and devices has become an important problem in recent years. One of the widely used countermeasures to combat power consumption based SCAs is to inject indiscriminate random noise sequences into the raw leakage traces. However, this method leads to significant increases in the energy consumption which is unaffordable cost for battery powered devices, and ways must be found to reduce the amount of energy in noise generation while keeping the side-channel invisible. In this paper, we propose a practical approach of energy efficient noise generation to prevent SCAs. We first take advantage of sparsity of the information in the leakage traces, and prove the existence of energy efficient noise generation that is optimized in the side channel protection under a given energy consumption budget, and also provide the optimal solution. Compared to the previous approach that also focuses on the energy efficiency, our solution is applicable to all general categories of compression methods. Furthermore, we also propose a practical noise generator design by aggregating the noise generation patterns under a variety of compression methods from different categories. As a result, the method presented in this paper is practically more applicable than previous one. The experimental results also validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.