This work presents a novel, black-box software-based countermeasure against physical attacks including power side-channel and fault-injection attacks. The approach uses the concept of random self-reducibility and self-correctness to add randomness and redundancy in the execution for protection. Our approach is at the operation level, is not algorithm-specific, and thus, can be applied for protecting a wide range of algorithms. The countermeasure is empirically evaluated against attacks over operations like modular exponentiation, modular multiplication, polynomial multiplication, and number theoretic transforms. An end-to-end implementation of this countermeasure is demonstrated for RSA-CRT signature algorithm and Kyber Key Generation public key cryptosystems. The countermeasure reduced the power side-channel leakage by two orders of magnitude, to an acceptably secure level in TVLA analysis. For fault injection, the countermeasure reduces the number of faults to 95.4% in average.
@article{arxiv.2405.05193,
title = {Systematic Use of Random Self-Reducibility against Physical Attacks},
author = {Ferhat Erata and TingHung Chiu and Anthony Etim and Srilalith Nampally and Tejas Raju and Rajashree Ramu and Ruzica Piskac and Timos Antonopoulos and Wenjie Xiong and Jakub Szefer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.05193},
year = {2024}
}