Research Article
Practicality of Using Side-Channel Analysis for Software Integrity Checking of Embedded Systems
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-319-28865-9_15, author={Hong Liu and Hongmin Li and Eugene Vasserman}, title={Practicality of Using Side-Channel Analysis for Software Integrity Checking of Embedded Systems}, proceedings={Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. 11th International Conference, SecureComm 2015, Dallas, TX, USA, October 26-29, 2015, Revised Selected Papers}, proceedings_a={SECURECOMM}, year={2016}, month={2}, keywords={Side-channels Power consumption Software integrity Security Embedded systems}, doi={10.1007/978-3-319-28865-9_15} }- Hong Liu
Hongmin Li
Eugene Vasserman
Year: 2016
Practicality of Using Side-Channel Analysis for Software Integrity Checking of Embedded Systems
SECURECOMM
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-28865-9_15
Abstract
We explore practicality of using power consumption as a non-destructive non-interrupting method to check integrity of software in a microcontroller. We explore whether or not instructions can lead to consistently distinguishable side-channel information, and if so, how the side-channel characteristics differ. Our experiments show that data dependencies rather than instruction operation dependencies are dominant, and can be utilized to provide practical side-channel-based methods for software integrity checking. For a subset of the instruction set, we further show that the discovered data dependencies can guarantee transformation of a given input into a unique output, so that any tampering with the program by a side-channel-aware attacker can either be detected from power measurements, or lead to the same unique set of input and output.
