Side Channel Assessment Platforms and Tools for Ubiquitous Systems

Abstract

Side Channel Attacks are nowadays considered a serious risk for many security products and ubiquitous devices. Strong security solution providers need to evaluate their implementations against such attacks before publishing them on the market, thus performing a thorough assessment. However, this procedure is not straightforward and even with the appropriate equipment, it may require considerable time to provide results due to the slow process of collecting measurements (traces) and the inflexible way of controlling the tested implementation. In this chapter, we explore and overview the trace collection landscape for generic devices under test (including ubiquitous systems) highlighting and overviewing the latest trace collection toolsets and their shortcomings, but also proposing a trace collection approach that can be applied on the most recent, open source toolsets. We showcase our proposed approach on the FlexLeco project architecture, which we have developed in our lab, and manage to practically describe how an evaluator using the proposed methodology can collect traces easily and quickly without the need to completely redesign a control mechanism for the implementation under test.