CISELEAKS: Information Leakage Assessment of Cryptographic Instruction Set Extension Prototypes

Software based cryptographic implementations provide flexibility but they face performance limitations. In contrast, hardware based cryptographic accelerators utilize application-specific customization to provide real-time security solutions. Cryptographic instruction-set extensions (CISE) combine t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on information forensics and security 2025-01, p.1-1
Main Authors: Jayasena, Aruna, Bachmann, Richard, Mishra, Prabhat
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cryptography
Encryption
Hardware acceleration
Information leakage
Instruction sets
Power demand
Prototypes
Side-channel attacks
Software
Vectors
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Summary:Software based cryptographic implementations provide flexibility but they face performance limitations. In contrast, hardware based cryptographic accelerators utilize application-specific customization to provide real-time security solutions. Cryptographic instruction-set extensions (CISE) combine the advantages of both hardware and software based solutions to provide higher performance combined with the flexibility of atomic-level cryptographic operations. While CISE is widely used to develop security solutions, side-channel analysis of CISE-based devices is in its infancy. Specifically, it is important to evaluate whether the power usage and electromagnetic emissions of CISE-based devices have any correlation with its internal operations, which an adversary can exploit to deduce cryptographic secrets. In this paper, we propose a test vector leakage assessment framework to evaluate the pre-silicon prototypes at the early stages of the design life-cycle. Specifically, we first identify functional units with the potential for leaking information through power side-channel signatures and then evaluate them on system prototypes by generating the necessary firmware to maximize the side-channel signature. Our experimental results on two RISC-V based cryptographic extensions, RISCV-CRYPTO and XCRYPTO, demonstrated that seven out of eight prototype AES-and SHA-related functional units are vulnerable to leaking cryptographic secrets through their power side-channel signature even in full system mode with a statistical significance of α = 0.05.
ISSN:1556-6013
1556-6021
DOI:10.1109/TIFS.2025.3531239