Investigating multi-thread utilization as a software defence mechanism against side channel attacks

Abstract

A state-of-the-art software countermeasure to defend against side channel attacks is investigated in this work. The implementation of this novel approach consists of using multithreads and a task scheduler on a microcontroller to purposefully leak out information at critical points in the cryptographic algorithm and confuse the attacker. This research demonstrates it is capable of outperforming the known countermeasure of hiding and shuffling in terms of preventing the secret information from being leaked out. Furthermore, the proposed countermeasure mitigates the side channel attacks, such as correlation power analysis and template attacks.