## Monday, October 6, 2014

### EM is beginning to lose the non-invasive touch

Anyone familiar with hardware side-channel attacks knows that electromagnetic (EM)-field attacks are considered the most practical and forgiving attack vector. This is owing to the non-invasive and localisation properties of EM-fields. We note this in contrast to early differential power analysis (DPA) [1] attacks which require a direct power tap (and often some modification to the target circuitry).

A recent publication at CHES2014 [2] seeks to challenge the state of EM-field attacks in an attempt to detect and subsequently prevent EM side-channel attacks. Prior attempts have been made to design an EM 'concious' devices (either by EM noise generation or active EM shielding [3]) but these have come at a heavy cost to area and power consumption, both of which are often of higher priority than security in an integrated circuit (IC) development cycle. This recent publication addresses these constraints and presents a simple and elegant solution to foil EM-field attacks.

First, let's recall the stages of an EM-field side-channel attack. An adversary must first buy/capture/'borrow' a target device. Having successfully gained physical access to the device, they must now establish a method to capture the EM-field side-channel leakage. A standard setup will include an near-field probe, an amplifier and a digitizer/oscilloscope. The probe is placed over an (experimentally determined) area of interest and the  adversary will record the EM-field radiation during the execution of some cryptographic operations. Additional information may be requires for specific attacks (ciphertexts or plaintests) but we'll stick to a generic scenario here.

In [2], the authors present a design methodology which allows the IC to detect probing attempts and prevent an attack early on in the process. The authors exploit the physical laws of EM-fields and mutual inductance to detect frequency shifts in the side-channel leakage owing to a near-field probe being placed in close proximity to the IC. If we consider the EM-frequency on the surface of the target IC as a result of some inductance ($L$) and capacitance $(C)$ we can calculate the frequency as follows:

$f_{LC} \approx \frac{1}{2\pi\sqrt{LC}}$

With the introduction of an EM-field probe, we expect the probe coil to produce its own field and hence a some form of mutual inductance ($M$) on the IC surface. The (shifted) EM-frequency at the IC surface will then present as:

$\bar{f}_{LC} \approx \frac{1}{2\pi\sqrt{(L-M)C}}$

We expect the mutual inductance to be inversely proportional to the distance between IC surface and the probe. Hence, as the probe approaches the surface, the frequency shift increases. At a high-level, the countermeasure detects the frequency shift and alerts the cryptographic core to the attack. However, any IC designer will point out, analogue circuity requires a careful design process and is often restrictive and costly. In addition, capturing a reference frequency may not always be possibly if the adversary has unfettered access to the device. The authors realise this and present a clever dual-coil control and detection logic implemented with a standard cell library and a MOS capacitor bank. This allows the entire design workflow to be (semi-)automated and hence greatly reducing the development time and resource constraints. We'll not go into the details of the design here but you can pick up all the information from their paper on eprint [2].

As a proof-of-concept design, the authors produced an $0.18\mu m$ process ASIC with an AES core and their EM detection logic. They proceeded to test the ASIC under a few different attack scenarios ranging from a vanilla EM attack to an adversary who is completely aware of the countermeasure and attempts to circumvent it. In all scenarios, the detection logic was able to pick-up the EM-probe and assert the control logic to halt the cryptographic operations. Arguably a solid result for the design team. The paper presents the system in a very nice and neat package for IC designers to pick up and implement. With relatively low overhead costs ($2\%$ area, $9\%$ power and $0.2\%$ performance) it is hard to argue against it. However, it is not without a few caveats.

The detection system will not be able to detect all EM attacks and the authors do acknowledge this in their conclusion. However they do not discuss this in any great detail. Having no access to their device I can guess at a few scenarios in which their system is too limited to detect an attack. Primarily (from my understanding) the authors always depackage the device (normally unnecessary when dealing with EM-field side-channel attacks and defeating the purpose of its non-invasive nature) and measure the probe distance relative to the die surface rather than the IC surface. There seems to be little mention on the effectiveness when with the device package still intact. Furthermore their current approach is limited to detecting probes from a maximum of $0.1mm$ to the die surface whereas EM leakage can picked up at far greater distances [4]. There is also the prospect that an adversary will not position the probe above the IC itself but over the support circuity around the IC (i.e. decoupling capacitors and power regulators). In this scenario, the countermeasures will be unable to detect any shift. Finally, there is little discussion on false-positives. All electrical devices will produce some form of mutual inductance and capacitive coupling so if we consider a device deployed in the field with these countermeasures. Will placing it near my smartphone (which contains several antennas and ICs) stop the device from performing any cryptographic operations? For its practical shortcomings though, this paper is a solid move in the direction to preventing EM side-channel attacks. Their design methodology and workflow make it appealing for practitioners and the simplicity behind their approach minimises the cost for IC manufacturers, overall a good contribution to the literature.

[1] http://www.cryptography.com/public/pdf/DPA.pdf
[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/541.pdf