Paper 2022/523

A side-channel based disassembler for the ARM-Cortex M0

Jurian van Geest and Ileana Buhan

Abstract

The most common application for side-channel attacks is the extraction of secret information, such as key material, from the implementation of a cryptographic algorithm. However, using side-channel information, we can extract other types of information related to the internal state of a computing device, such as the instructions executed and the content of registers. We used machine learning to build a side-channel disassembler for the ARM-Cortex M0 architecture, which can extract the executed instructions from the power traces of the device. Our disassembler achieves a success rate of 99% under ideal conditions and 88.2% under realistic conditions when distinguishing between groups of instructions. We also provide an overview of the lessons learned in relation to data preparation and noise minimization techniques.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Artificial Intelligence in Hardware Security (AIHWS 2022)
Contact author(s)
ileana buhan @ ru nl
jurianvgeest @ gmail com
History
2022-05-02: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/523
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/523,
      author = {Jurian van Geest and Ileana Buhan},
      title = {A side-channel based disassembler for the ARM-Cortex M0},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/523},
      year = {2022},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/523}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/523}
}
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