Chapter 9
Side Channel Assessment Platforms
and Tools for Ubiquitous Systems
Apostolos P. Fournaris, Athanassios Moschos, and Nicolas Sklavos
Abstract Side Channel Attacks are nowadays considered a serious risk for many
security products and ubiquitous devices. Strong security solution providers need
to evaluate their implementations against such attacks before publishing them
on the market, thus performing a thorough assessment. However, this procedure
is not straightforward and even with the appropriate equipment, it may require
considerable time to provide results due to the slow process of collecting measurements (traces) and the inflexible way of controlling the tested implementation. In
this chapter, we explore and overview the trace collection landscape for generic
devices under test (including ubiquitous systems) highlighting and overviewing the
latest trace collection toolsets and their shortcomings, but also proposing a trace
collection approach that can be applied on the most recent, open source toolsets.
We showcase our proposed approach on the FlexLeco project architecture, which
we have developed in our lab, and manage to practically describe how an evaluator
using the proposed methodology can collect traces easily and quickly without the
need to completely redesign a control mechanism for the implementation under test.
9.1 Introduction
The transition of computing devices to the ubiquitous era, where the cyber world
is merging with the physical world to bring an ever present layer of computer
intelligence to everyday life objects, is bringing, among other things, cybersecurity
and privacy into the physical world as an issue to be constantly considered.
Due to IP interconnected cyberphysical systems, attackers can gain access not
only to a victim’s data but also to the victim’s life itself, by controlling “smart”
A. P. Fournaris ()
Industrial Systems Institute/R.C. ATHENA, Patras, Greece
e-mail: fournaris@isi.gr
A. Moschos · N. Sklavos
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
University of Patras, Patras, Greece
© The Author(s) 2021
G. Avoine, J. Hernandez-Castro (eds.), Security of Ubiquitous Computing Systems,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10591-4_9
147
Side Channel Assessment Platforms
and Tools for Ubiquitous Systems
Apostolos P. Fournaris, Athanassios Moschos, and Nicolas Sklavos
Abstract Side Channel Attacks are nowadays considered a serious risk for many
security products and ubiquitous devices. Strong security solution providers need
to evaluate their implementations against such attacks before publishing them
on the market, thus performing a thorough assessment. However, this procedure
is not straightforward and even with the appropriate equipment, it may require
considerable time to provide results due to the slow process of collecting measurements (traces) and the inflexible way of controlling the tested implementation. In
this chapter, we explore and overview the trace collection landscape for generic
devices under test (including ubiquitous systems) highlighting and overviewing the
latest trace collection toolsets and their shortcomings, but also proposing a trace
collection approach that can be applied on the most recent, open source toolsets.
We showcase our proposed approach on the FlexLeco project architecture, which
we have developed in our lab, and manage to practically describe how an evaluator
using the proposed methodology can collect traces easily and quickly without the
need to completely redesign a control mechanism for the implementation under test.
9.1 Introduction
The transition of computing devices to the ubiquitous era, where the cyber world
is merging with the physical world to bring an ever present layer of computer
intelligence to everyday life objects, is bringing, among other things, cybersecurity
and privacy into the physical world as an issue to be constantly considered.
Due to IP interconnected cyberphysical systems, attackers can gain access not
only to a victim’s data but also to the victim’s life itself, by controlling “smart”
A. P. Fournaris ()
Industrial Systems Institute/R.C. ATHENA, Patras, Greece
e-mail: fournaris@isi.gr
A. Moschos · N. Sklavos
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
University of Patras, Patras, Greece
© The Author(s) 2021
G. Avoine, J. Hernandez-Castro (eds.), Security of Ubiquitous Computing Systems,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10591-4_9
147