Compiler-Assisted Threshold Implementation Against Power Analysis Attacks

Side-channel attack utilizes side-channel leakages to extract the secret in crypto systems. Various countermeasures for different algorithms and platforms have been proposed to protect crypto systems against such attacks. Manual countermeasure design requires deep understanding of the target algorithm and implementation, and oftentimes is platform-specific and error-prone. In this paper, we propose the construction of Threshold Implementation (TI), a provably secure countermeasure against power attacks, as an automated compiler pass in the open LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) framework. Attack results show that the automatically generated TI designs are secure against power attacks. As our proposed scheme implements the countermeasure at the intermediate representation (IR) level, our method can be applied to any cipher software in any programming language, and the generated implementations can be ported to different platforms and architectures.