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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
- These attacks aim to extract sensitive information like:
- 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.
- Timing attack:
- There are a growing number of known side-channel attack vectors. Some of the most common attacks are:
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
- Even though SCAs are difficult to execute on most modern systems, some developments are making SCAs more of a reality:
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.
- Power intensive:
- 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.
- More secure:
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.
What is Internet Of Things (IoT)?
IoT in India:
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Source: IE
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