RISE
AI assistant serves as first point of contact for legal questions
FreeSBee - Generation of Side-Channel-Free Software for Embedded Systems
Hardening of embedded RISC-V software by means of code transformations
Start: 02/2023
End: 01/2026
With increasing digitalization, more and more embedded systems are becoming part of the Internet of Things. This comprehensive network provides significant economic benefits. In many cases, however, security gaps still threaten broad integration. Side-channel attacks, especially timing attacks, are an essential category here.
FreeSBee explores a tool-based methodology for (partially) automated detection and elimination of security vulnerabilities based on timing attacks. Timing attacks make it possible to infer confidential information, such as secret keys, by observing variations in software runtime.
Based on the Astrée and CompCert tools, the FZI develops an approach that uses annotations of confidential information in source code to automatically detect all dependent potential code sections that could cause control-flow-based runtime variations.
The subsequent compilation process has been extended to eliminate these potential control-flow-based runtime variations through code transformations automatically. This allows the user to protect software against control-flow-based timing attacks with just a few annotations.
Approaches to eliminate microarchitecture-related runtime variations are also being investigated. The focus is on hardware architectures for the RISC-V instruction set.
Contact
Dr. rer. nat. Sebastian Reiter
Department Manager
Division: Intelligent Systems and Production Engineering
- +49 721 9654-430
- reiter@fzi.de
- Headquarters Karlsruhe
Research focus
Safety, Security and Law
In this research focus, the FZI investigates and conveys innovative concepts, methods for protecting IT systems, and legal framework conditions to enable secure digitalization.
Funding notice:
The joint project FreeSBee is funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space.
Project partner:
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