Power Masking

Masking is a scheme in which the intermediate variable is not dependent on an easily accessible subset of secret key. This results in making it impossible to deduce the secret key with partial information gathered through electromagnetic leakage.

Sources

  • M.-L. Akkar and C. Giraud. An implementation of des and aes, secure against some attacks. In CHES ’01: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, pages 309–318, London, UK, 2001. Springer-Verlag.
  • J.-S. Coron and L. Goubin. On boolean and arithmetic masking against differential power analysis. In CHES ’00: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, pages 231–237, London, UK, 2000. Springer-Verlag.
  • L. Goubin. A sound method for switching between boolean and arithmetic masking. In CHES ’01: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, pages 3–15, London, UK, 2001. Springer-Verlag.

Best Segment for Countermeasure Deployment

  • Space Segment

NIST Rev5 Controls

D3FEND Techniques

D3FEND Artifacts

None

ISO 27001

ID: CM0061
NASA Best Practice Guide:  MI-AUTH-01 | MI-AUTH-02 | MI-INTG-01 | MI-DCO-02
ESA Space Shield Mitigation: 
Created: 2022/10/19
Last Modified: 2023/10/17

Techniques Addressed by Countermeasure

ID Name Description
EXF-0002 Side-Channel Attack Threat actors may use a side-channel attack attempts to gather information by measuring or exploiting indirect effects of the spacecraft. Information within the spacecraft can be extracted through these side-channels in which sensor data is analyzed in non-trivial ways to recover subtle, hidden or unexpected information. A series of measurements of a side-channel constitute an identifiable signature which can then be matched against a signature database to identify target information, without having to explicitly decode the side-channel.
.02 Electromagnetic Leakage Attacks Threat actors can leverage electromagnetic emanations to obtain sensitive information. The electromagnetic radiations attain importance when they are hardware generated emissions, especially emissions from the cryptographic module. Electromagnetic leakage attacks have been shown to be more successful than power analysis attacks on chicards. If proper protections are not in place on the spacecraft, the circuitry is exposed and hence leads to stronger emanations of EM radiations. If the circuitry is exposed, it provides an easier environment to study the electromagnetic emanations from each individual component.

Space Threats Addressed by Countermeasure

ID Description
SV-CF-2 Eavesdropping (RF and proximity)  
SV-AC-5 Proximity operations (i.e., grappling satellite)