2025/10/15 by Nuntipat Narkthong, Narkthong, Nuntipat, Yukui Luo +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Cryptographic Implementations and Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hardware Architecture (cs.AR) #Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security #Radiation Effects in Electronics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.13111
openalex publication_date 2025/10/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The run-time electromagnetic (EM) emanation of microprocessors presents a side-channel that leaks the confidentiality of the applications running on them. Many recent works have demonstrated successful attacks leveraging such side-channels to extract the confidentiality of diverse applications, such as the key of cryptographic algorithms and the hyperparameter of neural network models. This paper proposes ShuffleV, a microarchitecture defense strategy against EM Side-Channel Attacks (SCAs). ShuffleV adopts the moving target defense (MTD) philosophy, by integrating hardware units to randomly shuffle the execution order of program instructions and optionally insert dummy instructions, to nullify the statistical observation by attackers across repetitive runs. We build ShuffleV on the open-source RISC-V core and provide six design options, to suit different application scenarios. To enable rapid evaluation, we develop a ShuffleV simulator that can help users to (1) simulate the performance overhead for each design option and (2) generate an execution trace to validate the randomness of execution on their workload. We implement ShuffleV on a Xilinx PYNQ-Z2 FPGA and validate its performance with two representative victim applications against EM SCAs, AES encryption, and neural network inference. The experimental results demonstrate that ShuffleV can provide automatic protection for these applications, without any user intervention or software modification.