Review of Side Channel Attacks and Comparison of Masking and Re-keying Countermeasures

Abstract

Side Channel Analysis has been an open problem among the information security designers. As the industry is moving towards IoT based devices, security at hardware level has been of prime importance. Side Channel Analysis include various attacks like timing attack, power consumption related attack, Electro-magnetic leaks related attacks, memory footprint related attack, acoustic attack, attacks due to architectural vulnerabilities etc. These attacks bypass the mathematical security provided by the algorithms. Many of these attacks have been specific to cloud technology or server sides. However, power analysis attacks are such types of attacks that are common amongst all the processing devices like IoT, cloud server, smart cards etc. The Power Analysis attacks are further categorized to attacks like Simple Power Analysis (SPA), Differential Power Analysis (DPA), Profile attacks, etc. Successful Differential Power Analysis (DPA) attacks have happened in both research and real-world scenarios. Work has been done to make the attack powerful, efficient in the literature. Countermeasures such as Masking and Guarding have been implemented at various levels. Re-keying has also been studied by several researchers as a countermeasure for DPA and other power analysis attacks. Masking relies on making the statistical analysis quite difficult by adding layers. Whereas, re-keying focuses on making the discovery of key futile by leaving with less number of samples to make the statistical analysis infeasible. All these methods have been researched and discovered in isolation. This paper focuses on the holistic review of masking and re-keying to conclude the vital parameters and qualitative analysis to compare the two different categories of schemes and explores the possibility towards a hybrid approach that would develop an optimal solution to counter the DPA and other related attacks.