Hardware/Software Cooperative Design Against Power Side-Channel Attacks on IoT Devices

With the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) era, the protection of secret information on IoT devices is becoming increasingly important. For IoT devices, attacks that target information leakage through physical side-channels (e.g., a power side-channel) are a major threat in many use cases because IoT devices can be accessed easily by a hostile third party. However, securing resource-constrained IoT devices against side-channel attacks is a challenging issue. Generally, it is difficult to satisfy the requirements on side-channel protection while maintaining the low-power and real-time constrains of IoT devices. In this article, we propose a hardware/software cooperative design for cryptosystems that is suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices. Combining a security-oriented processor design (i.e., an instruction set architecture definition and its architectural structure) and careful implementations of masked software implementation for cipher algorithms can effectively improve the power–performance–area (PPA) while suppressing power side-channel leakage. In our evaluation, for three ciphers (Chaskey, Simon, and advanced encryption standard), we demonstrate that our work is superior to state-of-the-art works (two RISC-V processors and a small-scale low-power processor) in terms of both PPA and power side-channel protection.