SILK: high level of abstraction leakage simulator for side channel analysis

Abstract

This paper proposes a new way of simulating leakage traces using high level of abstraction models and presents a proof of concept implementation simulator called SILK -- a tool for leakage simulation for side channel analysis of microcontrollers and microprocessors. SILK is a high level of abstraction simulator that builds a leakage trace based on a source code of an algorithm and several user-defined parameters. One of the main purposes of SILK is data generation for quick analysis of new attacks, countermeasures or preprocessing methods. SILK might also be used to compare different types of attacks, analysis techniques or software countermeasures. This paper presents general structure and parameters of SILK and a typical example of use case. Our experiments were done with two algorithms that run on a microcontroller in order to compare our simulations with real power traces. We compared simulated traces with real power traces using Dynamic Time Warping technique with two different distance metrics. We also compared our simulations with real power traces using Correlation Power Analysis (CPA). We were also able to show that using a high level of abstraction simulation we are able to produce datasets that might be used for side channel analysis.