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An Efficient Profiling-Based Side-Channel Attack on Graphics Processing Units

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Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1055))

Abstract

The encryption/decryption algorithms have been ported to GPU platforms to take advantage of the GPUs’ high-throughput computing capability. The downside of moving the cryptographic algorithms onto GPUs, however, is that the vulnerability of side-channel attacks for GPUs has not been well studied and the confidential information may be under a great risk by processing encryption on GPUs. In this paper, we proposed to leverage a profiling-based side-channel attack (SCA) to expose GPUs’ side-channel vulnerability and the weakness of security services provided by GPUs. Our results show that GPUs are particularly vulnerable to profiling-based side-channel attacks and need to be protected against side-channel threats. Especially, for AES-128, the proposed method can recover all key bytes in less than 1 min, outperforming all prior SCAs we know.

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Correspondence to Wei Zhang .

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Wang, X., Zhang, W. (2020). An Efficient Profiling-Based Side-Channel Attack on Graphics Processing Units. In: Choo, KK., Morris, T., Peterson, G. (eds) National Cyber Summit (NCS) Research Track. NCS 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1055. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31239-8_11

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