RIJID: Random Code Injection to Mask Power Analysis based Side Channel Attacks

Side channel attacks are becoming a major threat to the security of embedded systems. Countermeasures proposed to overcome Simple Power Analysis (SPA) and Differential Power Analysis (DPA), are data masking, table masking, current flattening, circuitry level solutions, dummy instruction insertions and balancing bit-flips. All these techniques are either susceptible to multi-order side channel attacks, not sufficiently generic to cover all encryption algorithms, or burden the system with high area cost, run-time or energy consumption. A HW/SW based randomized instruction injection technique is proposed in this paper to overcome the pitfalls of previous countermeasures. Our technique injects random instructions at random places during the execution of an application which protects the system from both SPA and DPA. Further, we devise a systematic method to measure the security level of a power sequence and use it to measure the number of random instructions needed, to suitably confuse the adversary. Our processor model costs 1.9% in additional area for a simplescalar processor, and costs on average 29.8% in runtime and 27.1% in additional energy consumption for six industry standard cryptographic algorithms.