Indian researchers develop low-energy chip architecture to prevent attacks on IoT devices

What is the News?

Indian researchers have built a low-energy security chip that is designed to prevent Side-channel attacks(SCAs) on IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

What are Side-channel attacks(SCA)?

SCA is a security exploit that aims to gather information from the indirect effects of the functioning of the system hardware rather than attacking a programme or software directly.

They basically aim to extract sensitive information like cryptographic keys, proprietary machine learning models and parameters by measuring things like timing information, power consumption and electromagnetic leaks of a system.

For example, it can be used on a smartwatch to extract ECG and heart rate signals that one wants to keep secret.

What have the researchers done to prevent SCA attacks?

Researchers have developed a low-energy security chip that is designed to prevent Side-channel attacks(SCAs) on IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

The chip uses near-threshold computing, a computing method where the data is split into separate, unique and random components. The chip then conducts operations separately on each component in a random order before aggregating the results for a final result.

Due to this method, the information leak from the device through power-consumption measurements are random and would reveal nothing but gibberish in an SCA. 

What are the advantages and disadvantages of this chip?

Advantages: It is smaller than the size of a thumbnail and uses much less power than traditional security measures against SCAs. It has also been built to be easily incorporated into smartwatches, tablets, and a variety of other devices.

Disadvantages: This method is energy and computation power-intensive, while also requiring more system memory to store information.

Source: This post is based on the article “Indian researchers develop low-energy chip architecture to prevent attacks on IoT devices” published in Indian Express on 8th Mar 2022.