Securing software cryptographic primitives for embedded systems against side channel attacks

Side Channel Attacks (SCA) exploit information leakage from the physical implementation of a cryptographic primitive to recover secret values. Such attacks are a practical threat against embedded and cyber-physical systems physically exposed to malicious adversaries, and have been proven strong enough to breach a good deal of commercial grade systems. Given the wide diffusion of such devices, a systematic approach to the development of secure implementation of cryptographic primitives is necessary. In this paper, we provide an introduction to side channel attacks, and report a practical and automated security metric to capture the vulnerability of such software implementations to passive SCAs. A set of tools to compute the security metric and instantiate countermeasures is also described, together with a practical experimental validation of the effectiveness of such countermeasures.