ABBY: Automating leakage modelling for side-channel analysis

Mitigating side-channel leakage in cryptographic components is a vital concern for developers working with embedded devices. Conventional side-channel analysis demands substantial manual effort for setup preparation and trace recording, rendering it more intricate during the dynamic design phase, where software alterations occur frequently. Additionally, identifying the specific instruction(s) responsible for leakage has been hindered by limited hardware descriptions and restricted access to process technology information. We introduce ABBY, an open-source side-channel leakage profiling framework that targets the microarchitectural layer. Existing solutions to characterize the microarchitectural layer are devicespecific and/or require extensive manual effort. ABBY's main innovation is data collection, which can automatically characterize the microarchitectural behaviour of a target device and has the additional benefit of being extendable to other similar devices. Using ABBY, we created two datasets that capture the interaction of instructions for the ARM CORTEX-M0/M3 architecture. These sets are the first to capture detailed information on the microarchitectural layer. They can be used to explore various leakage models suitable for creating side-channel leakage simulators. A preliminary evaluation of a leakage model produced with our dataset of real-world cryptographic implementations shows performance comparable to state-of-the-art leakage simulators.