Automated Masking of Software Implementations on Industrial Microcontrollers
Arnold Abromeit1, Florian Bache2,a, Leon A. Becker2, Marc Gourjon4,5, Tim Güneysu1,5,b, Sabrina Jorn1, Amir Moradi2, Maximilian Orlt6 and Falk Schellenberg7
1Falk Schellenberg
2Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
3Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany
4NXP Semiconductors Germany GmbH, Hamburg, Germany
5Cyber Physical Systems, DFKI GmbH, Bremen, Germany
6Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
7MPI-SP, Germany
aflorian.bache@rub.de
btim.gueneysu@rub.de
ABSTRACT
Physical side-channel attacks threaten the security of exposed embedded devices, such as microcontrollers. Dedicated countermeasures, like masking, are necessary to prevent these powerful attacks. However, a gap between well-studied leakage models and observed leakage on real devices makes the application of these countermeasures non-trivial. This work provides a gadget-based concept to automated masking covering practically relevant leakage models to achieve security on real-world devices. We realize this concept with a fully automated compiler that transforms unprotected microcontroller-implementations of cryptographic primitives into masked executables, capable of being executed on the target device. In a case study, we apply our approach to a bitsliced LED implementation and perform a TVLA-based security evaluation of its core component: the PRESENT s-box.
