Resilience of AES software implementations against side-channel attacks on micro-controllers

Details

Supervisors

Standaert, François-Xavier

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil électricien, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Embedded software security has become nowadays a prominent concern driven by the widespread use of micro-controllers across a diverse range of applications including IoT devices. Ensuring robust security against side-channel attacks has become a crucial objective for enterprises. This thesis specifically focuses on the evaluation of the resilience of AES software implementations on micro-controllers against side-channel attacks. The study delves into the process of conducting a template attack, encompassing both the training and attack phases, to assess the effectiveness of such attacks thanks to state-of-art methodologies. Furthermore, the resilience of two distinct AES implementations, namely lookup table based and fixsliced AES, is thoroughly examined. The findings underscore that, despite the incorporation of countermeasures, software implementations remain susceptible to compromise given a sufficient number of traces. This work sheds light on the significance of implementing robust security countermeasures in embedded software systems to effectively mitigate the risk of side-channel attacks.