Timing SCA against HMAC to investigate from the execution time of algorithm viewpoint

Abstract

Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), or synchrophasors, are rapidly being deployed in the smart grid with the goal of measuring phasor quantities concurrently from wide area distribution substations. There are a variety of security attacks on the PMU communications infrastructure. Timing Side Channel Attack (SCA) is one of these possible attacks. In this paper, timing side channel vulnerability against execution time of the HMAC-SHA1 authentication algorithm is considered. Both linear and negative binomial regression are used to model some security features of the stored key, e.g., its length and Hamming weight. The goal is to reveal secret-related information based on leakage models. The results would mitigate the cryptanalysis process of an attacker.