Side Channel Analysis

Catalog description

Side-channel analysis (SCA) is an offensive security technique that targets not the formal description of a security-critical system, but the implementation of it. Examples of side channels include—but are not limited to—latency measurements, power consumption, electro-magnetic radiation, and acoustic emanations. This is a young but very active field within applied computer security. Modern processors are equipped with numerous features to improve the average performance of software, including—but not limited to—low-latency execution pipelines, various caches, prediction, speculative execution, and multi-layered parallelism. These mechanisms can often be used as side channels to attack implementations of security-critical systems by using leakage to recover critical data or state that should remain secret. This course provides an overview of these modern SCA concepts, explains how to establish and construct these channels, demonstrates how to apply SCA techniques, and furthermore basic methods to prevent them. Students will also be exposed to current literature covering research in side-channel analysis. Students will program in C and need a strong understanding of the design of modern computer architectures.