Rooting Out Malware with a Side-Channel Chip Defense System
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It seems like this is a kind of equivalent to constant-time operations -- but constant-power operations?
Is that also relevant to defending against DPA? Should we think of the proposed technique as a new application of DPA? (Is Cryptography Research going to sue them?)
Not really, like I said the idea is similar but as fabulist pointed out [1], they have a whitelist approach so I'm not really sure that our idea could systematically break their system.
> It seems like this is a kind of equivalent to constant-time operations -- but constant-power operations?
You get the right intuition, but no. There are constant-power countermeasures but this is not it. You see, there are two types of side-channel countermeasures: palliatives and curatives. Palliative countermeasures, like the one we discussed in the paper I mentioned in my previous comment, attempt to make the attack more difficult by blurring the information the attacker has access to using randomness, but there is no theoretical foundation behind. By contrast, curative countermeasures aim at providing a leak-free implementation based on a security rationale. There are two strategies to achieve this: the first one is to make the leakage as decorrelated as possible from the sensitive data (masking), and the second one is to make the leakage constant, irrespective of the sensitive data (balancing).
So your idea of constant-power exists, it is called balancing. I worked on this kind of countermeasures at assembly code level [2] if you are interested, and there are many other very interesting papers in the references to go through.
> Is that also relevant to defending against DPA?
Yes, it is mostly relevant against DPA. Actually constant-power operations are good against DPA, but absolutely not against PFP (what the linked post describes) since it makes it easier: it's always the same power trace!
> Should we think of the proposed technique as a new application of DPA? (Is Cryptography Research going to sue them?)
Since it seems to be done live I would rather say SPA (Simple Power Analysis) than DPA, but I guess the safer is to say that it is a (possibly new) application of the power side channel analysis.
(I don't know.)
How do you visualize the power profile of a specific program (can you)? Could you use a simple power analyzer to potentially detect malware, or do you need something more refined?
I don't really know. Most power analysis side channel attacks focus on embedded systems where only the target code runs. But recently, TAU researchers did very cool stuff with power analysis on laptops running a normal OS [1] and their presentation at CHES last year was very impressive.
* Broadcast signals at the PFP enabled devices to cause false alarms, in order to convince the operators that the devices are unreliable.
* Hack the system at a time where the administrators are performing an "unusual" operation (such as installing a firmware update).
* Write your exploits such that they establish a minimal beachhead in the hacked daemon faster than would cause alarm (the article said it could detect malware in "milliseconds" -- you can do a lot in a millisecond), and then proceed very, very slowly. The PFP would still detect your malicious activity, but you would keep the signal/noise low enough that an alarm wouldn't be raised.
* In some circumstances it may be possible to achieve exploitation while restricting yourself to "usual" activity. Turning a switch into a hub would raise alarms; enabling a disabled ethernet port probably wouldn't. Similarly, using functionality which is already included on the device (such as functions in libc) would probably go unnoticed.
This is, of course, pure speculation.
I stopped right there because I smell assumptions that any number of things might violate: background tasks, VMs, VPN software, background P2P networking software (e.g. belonging to a Kad network), auto-updaters, debuggers, system profilers, management software for IT asset control, etc.
That and malware authors would immediately set about working to make their power profiles more typical. What they've found is that current malware produced with no attention to obfuscating this aspect often looks different from current typical application code.
Can't see this being robust at all. Sounds like a whole pile of false positives too. I suppose something like this could be used as part of an array of detection methods deployed to devices to help monitor for suspicious changes in baseline activity that could then be investigated.
"Computers with users regularly attached to them, like laptops and smartphones, often have no baseline routine from which abnormal behavior can be inferred. [emphasis mine!] So, PFP officials say, their technology is at the moment better suited to things like routers, networks, power grids, critical infrastructure, and other more automated systems."
Using "side channel" hints is actually what (some) humans do to suspect malware infection too - unusually large amounts of HDD or network activity while the system is idle, or CPU fans running much more than normal, tends to raise suspicion.