Industry Expert Blogs

In a world where increasingly sensitive tasks take place online, cryptography is becoming a critical discipline. Whether it is dating, private banking, or filing taxes, people want reassurance that their data is safe and secure.

Look at side-channel attacks, which hit global prominence in 2018 with the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Spectre and Meltdown were the world’s introduction to side-channels. Through these, nefarious elements were able to use by-products of the processor’s behavior, such as electro-magnetic radiation or microarchitectural timing, to locate, reconstruct, and steal secret data.

Over the last couple of years, a team at Sorbonne Université in Paris, France has been using Arm’s Cortex-M3 processor source code to model what is really happening in the hardware at the micro-architectural level. They also look to verify how secure existing silicon really is in the face of side-channel vulnerabilities.

Here, the team share how the project came about; how micro-architectural leakage modeling works; and how they hope it helps make the world more secure…

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