Integrating Side Channel Security into the High Level Synthesis based Design Flow
Abstract
In the Internet of Things era, edge devices have been considerably diversified and are often designed using high level synthesis (HLS), which translates behavioral descriptions into hardware descriptions, for improved design productivity. However, HLS tools were originally developed in a security-unaware manner, resulting in vulnerabilities to side-channel attacks. In our recent work that was published at ACM Trans. on Embedded Computing Systems, we integrated side-channel security in the state-of-the-art high-level-synthesis-based hardware design flow, leveraging a provably countermeasure called the threshold implementation. As case studies for lightweight block ciphers composed of addition/rotation/XOR (ARX)-based permutations, our evaluation using an FPGA board demonstrated that our proposed method can successfully improve the side-channel security for all ARX-based ciphers used as benchmarks.
Yuko Hara-Azumi received her Ph.D. degree in Information Science from Nagoya University, Japan, in 2010. She was a JSPS postdoctoral research fellow from 2010 to 2012, during which she was also a visiting scholar at University of California, Irvine, USA and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. In 2012, she joined Nara Institute of Science and Technology, as an assistant professor. Since 2014, she has been with School of Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, where she is currently an associate professor. She was a visiting scholar at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium in 2023. Her research interests include system-level design automation, microprocessor architecture, and hardware/software co-design for embedded/IoT systems.