Securing Storage Instructions: A Hamming Weight Balancing Approach to Prevent Secret Leaks Through Side Channels
Jianfeng Du, Zhu Wang, Aimin Yu · IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems · 2025
Cryptographic devices are sensitive to side-channel attacks, which inevitably leak electromagnetic radiation, power consumption, time, and other physical information during execution. The side-channel storage vulnerability caused by storage instructions has become one of the main targets for attackers, posing a serious threat to the implementation security of cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, following revealing the essence of the side-channel storage vulnerability at the computer architecture level, two novel technologies, by reducing the correlation between the processed data and emissions, are proposed to defend such attacks, namely the randomizing Hamming weight scheme and the balancing Hamming weight scheme. Furthermore, we apply the proposed scheme to AES and CRYSTALS-Kyber on the Cortex-M4 CPU. The experimental results show that this strategy can effectively eliminate the side-channel storage vulnerability at a low cost of time and space, thereby ensuring the secure implementation of cryptographic algorithms.