Securing Embedded Processors against Power Analysis Based Side Channel Attacks Using Reconfigurable Architecture

Power analysis based side channel attacks are significant security risk in embedded applications. Reconfigurable architecture has already been proposed as a security improvement method for run time monitoring systems or implementing critical parts of cryptographic applications. Here we propose reconfigurable architecture as a hardware countermeasure against power analysis based side channel attacks. We augment an embedded processor with a reconfigurable functional unit (RFU). By random execution of custom instructions on the RFU we mask power analysis based side channel attacks. Moreover we devised an automatic design flow to generate RFU and its configuration bits from cryptographic algorithms´ source code. Obfuscation of base processor power traces as our primary goal is complied with RFUs covering in average about 30% of object code. We also report the power traces for our secure processor and the overall timing and area overhead. The correlation coefficient is calculated for AES and SHA cryptographic algorithms and experimental results show our method produces power traces close to random traces. Our approach is completely generic and can be used for any cryptographic application. Compared to previous methods, our work costs no runtime overhead and an average of 27% area overhead.