Hardware Support for Constant-Time Programming Article Swipe
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· 2023
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613424.3623796
· OA: W4389491888
Side-channel attacks are one of the rising security concerns in modern computing platforms. Observing this, researchers have proposed both hardware-based and software-based strategies to mitigate side-channel attacks, targeting not only on-chip caches but also other hardware components like memory controllers and on-chip networks. While hardware-based solutions to side-channel attacks are usually costly to implement as they require modifications to the underlying hardware, software-based solutions are more practical as they can work on unmodified hardware. One of the recent software-based solutions is constant-time programming, which tries to transform an input program to be protected against side-channel attacks such that an operation working on a data element/block to be protected would execute in an amount of time that is independent of the input. Unfortunately, while quite effective from a security angle, constant-time programming can lead to severe performance penalties.
