COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONStable

CWE-1300

Improper Protection of Physical Side Channels

The device does not contain sufficient protection mechanisms to prevent physical side channels from exposing sensitive information due to patterns in physically observable phenomena such as variations in power consumption, electromagnetic emissions (EME), or acoustic emissions.

Abstraction

Base

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The device does not contain sufficient protection mechanisms to prevent physical side channels from exposing sensitive information due to patterns in physically observable phenomena such as variations in power consumption, electromagnetic emissions (EME), or acoustic emissions.

Extended description

An adversary could monitor and measure physical phenomena to detect patterns and make inferences, even if it is not possible to extract the information in the digital domain. Physical side channels have been well-studied for decades in the context of breaking implementations of cryptographic algorithms or other attacks against security features. These side channels may be easily observed by an adversary with physical access to the device, or using a tool that is in close proximity. If the adversary can monitor hardware operation and correlate its data processing with power, EME, and acoustic measurements, the adversary might be able to recover of secret keys and data.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Read MemoryRead Application Data

Affected security scopes: Confidentiality

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Architecture and Design

Architecture and design approach

Detail
Apply blinding or masking techniques to implementations of cryptographic algorithms.

Implementation

Implementation-phase defence

Detail
Add shielding or tamper-resistant protections to the device to increase the difficulty of obtaining measurements of the side-channel.

Verification

How is it detected?

Manual Analysis

Moderate
Perform a set of leakage detection tests such as the procedure outlined in the Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA) test requirements for AES [REF-1230]. TVLA is the basis for the ISO standard 17825 [REF-1229]. A separate methodology is provided by [REF-1228]. Note that sole reliance on this method might not yield expected results [REF-1239] [REF-1240].

Manual Analysis

Moderate
Post-silicon, perform full side-channel attacks (penetration testing) covering as many known leakage models as possible against test code.

Manual Analysis

Moderate
Pre-silicon - while the aforementioned TVLA methods can be performed post-silicon, models of device power consumption or other physical emanations can be built from information present at various stages of the hardware design process before fabrication. TVLA or known side-channel attacks can be applied to these simulated traces and countermeasures applied before tape-out. Academic research in this field includes [REF-1231] [REF-1232] [REF-1233].