Early Analysis of Security Threats by Modeling and Simulating Power Attacks in SystemC

Side-channel attacks (SCA) enable attackers to gain access to non-disclosed information by measuring emissions of a system, for example, electromagnetic waves or power consumption. In existing design processes, the emissions of a system can only be measured on the final system. As a consequence, the analysis of such security threats is often only possible at a very late stage in the development process. In this paper, we present an approach to simulate power attacks in early stages of the development process. The key idea of our approach is threefold: First, we use the powerful system level design language SystemC to provide a detailed model of the power consumption of a given system. Second, we provide a graphical user interface to visualize and analyze the power consumption. Third, we develop predefined attacker modules in SystemC. Together, we provide a framework to simulate and analyze whether known power attacks are successful on a given system. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by modeling and simulating a simple power attack (SPA) on a system that uses elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), a differential power attack on a system that uses RSA encryption, and a cross-correlation analysis on the same system.