Sequence-crafter: side-channel entropy minimization to thwart timing-based side-channel attacks: work-in-progress

Abstract

The hardware security domain in recent years has experienced a plethora of side-channel attacks (SCAs) with cache-based SCAs being one of the dominant threats. These SCAs function by exploiting the side-channels which invariably leak important data during an application's execution. Shutting down the side channels is not a feasible approach due to various restrictions it would pose to system performance. To overcome such concerns and protect the data integrity, we introduce Sequence-Crafter (SC) in this work. The proposed Sequence-Crafter (SC) aims to minimize the entropy in the side channel leaked information rather than attempting to close the side-channels. To achieve this, we introduce carefully crafted perturbations into the victim application which will be randomly activated to introduce perturbations, thus resulting in misleading information which looks legit that will be observed by the attacker. This methodology has been successfully tested for Flush+Reload attack and the key information observed by the attacker is seen to be completely futile, indicating the success of proposed method.