Low-energy Security Chip Architecture

In News

• Recently, two Indian researchers working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have built a low-energy security chip.

About 

• It is designed to prevent side-channel attacks (SCAs) on IoT (Internet of Things) devices. 

Image Courtesy: Infosec 

Side Channel Attacks (SCAs)

• About: 
  • SCAs take advantage of security exploits where information can be gathered from the indirect effects of the functioning of the system hardware rather than attacking a programme or software directly.
• Usage:
  • Traditionally, SCAs have been used in cryptography. 
  • If some data is being processed and there is a secret key used to encrypt or decrypt it, SCAs could be used in some cases to recover this key. 
  • It can be applied to any data that you want to keep secret. 
  • For example, it can be used on smartwatches to extract ECG and heart rate signals of the user.
• Aim of such attacks:
  • These attacks aim to extract sensitive information like: 
    • cryptographic keys, 
    • proprietary machine learning models and parameters 
• Process: 
  • It is done by measuring things like timing information, power consumption and electromagnetic leaks of a system.
• Logic: 
  • SCA uses other auxiliary information to check on the original problem.
  • SCA uses the information from the execution of an act to determine what is happening rather than looking at the act itself.
• What attacks use side channel analysis?
  • There are a growing number of known side-channel attack vectors. Some of the most common attacks are:
    • Timing attack: 
      • Analyzes the time a system spends executing cryptographic algorithms. 
    • Electromagnetic (EM) attack: 
      • Measures and performs a signal analysis on the electromagnetic radiation emitted from a device.
    • Simple power analysis (SPA): 
      • Directly observes the power and electromagnetic (EM) variations of a cryptographic system during operations.
    • Differential power analysis (DPA): 
      • Obtains and analyzes detailed statistical measurements across multiple operations.
    • Template attack: 
      • Recovers cryptographic keys by exploiting an identical “template” device and comparing side-channel data.

Low Energy Chip Architecture

• Characteristics: 
  • The chip is smaller than the size of a thumbnail.
  • It uses much less power than traditional security measures against SCAs. 
  • It has been built to be easily incorporated into smartwatches, tablets, and a variety of other devices.
• Usage:
  • It can be used in any sensor node which connects user data.
• Method:
  • The chip uses near-threshold computing, a computing method where the data to be worked on is first split into separate, unique and random components. 
  • The chip then conducts operations separately on each component in a random order before aggregating the results for a final result.
• Scope of improvement:
  • Even though SCAs are difficult to execute on most modern systems, some developments  are making SCAs more of a reality: 
    • The increasing sophistication of machine learning algorithms, 
    • Greater computing power of devices and 
    • Measuring devices with increasing sensitivities

Improvements by New Research: 

• About: 
  • These researchers from MIT found a way to optimise this process to reduce some of the computational overheads. 
• Claim: 
  • The researchers claim they have reduced the required computing overheads by three orders of magnitude with their chip architecture.
• Problem: 
  • Power intensive: 
    • The implementation of this chip architecture in a system would require at least a five-fold increase in energy consumption 1.6 times the silicon area of an insecure implementation. 
  • Limited protection: 
    • The architecture only protects against energy consumption-based SCAs and doesn’t defend against electromagnetic SCAs.
  • Storage: 
    • Requiring more system memory to store information.
• Advantage:
  • More secure: 
    • Due to this method, the information leak from the device through power-consumption measurements are random and would reveal nothing but gibberish in an SCA. 
  • User friendly:
    • It can be used in any sensor node which connects user data. 

Way Ahead

• The Research and Development in this sector should not reduce its pace until a solution is reached which caters to all the existing problems.

Source: IE