Quantifying timing-based information flow in cryptographic hardware

Abstract

Cryptographic function implementations are known to leak information about private keys through timing information. By using statistical analysis of the variations in runtime required to encrypt different messages, an attacker can relatively easily determine the key with high probability. There are many mitigation techniques to combat these side channels; however, there are limited metrics available to quantify the effectiveness of these mitigation attacks. In this work, we employ information theoretic ideas to quantify the amount of leakage that can be extracted from runtime measurements and reveal the influence of individual key bits on the timing observations across a variety of hardware implementations. By studying different RSA hardware architectures (each with different performance optimizations and mitigation techniques), we determine the effectiveness of these information theoretic techniques against the success of attacks. Our experimental results show that mutual information is a promising metric to quantify timing-based information leakage and it also correlates to the attack-ability of a cryptographic implementation.