Bringing an additional layer of fortification to SoCs powering the next trillion connected devices

October 24, 2017

News highlights:

• Arm announces availability of new on-die technology to protect against attacks seeking to compromise sensitive information through IC power consumption (SPA/DPA) and electromagnetic emission (SEMA/DEMA)

• Enables simple, scalable, easy to integrate and cost-effective implementation

Last year at Arm TechCon, SoftBank Chairman and President Masayoshi Son laid out an ambitious vision of a trillion connected devices. It’s a vision Arm is aggressively pursuing by working with our ecosystem to invisibly enable those trillion devices to connect securely.

Connecting a trillion devices is no easy task of course but doing it securely is key. Especially when the tools and techniques used by attackers are rapidly evolving to go after every piece of system hardware from foundational SoCs to peripheral components. All are seen as an opportunity to access privileged data. With daily occurrences of cyber-attacks, it’s clear security across the entire device needs to be considered at the design stage, not as an afterthought.

At the SoC level, there are many classes of threats including those where attackers try to take advantage of the physical characteristics of the silicon implementation manifested during algorithmic execution. Today we’re announcing the availability of highly-efficient on-die threat mitigation technology designed to protect against threats including:

• Simple and Differential Power Analysis (SPA/DPA), where an attacker is trying to compromise confidential information (e.g. a secret cryptographic key) through various analysis methods of the power consumed by an integrated circuit (IC) during operation

• Simple and Differential Electromagnetic Analysis (SEMA/DEMA), where an attacker is trying to compromise confidential information (e.g. a secret cryptographic key) through various analysis methods of the electromagnetic field created during IC operation

The power and electromagnetic analysis mitigation technology relieves designers of the need to worry about this category of non-invasive attacks, while providing a solution that is easily scalable to cover changes in the protected logic. The resulting system benefit is addressing the leakage source directly and preventing sensitive data leakage through the IC power consumption and electromagnetic emission. From an implementation perspective, the mitigation technology is applicable across the full spectrum of silicon processes used in the semiconductor industry.

Trust between connected devices and their users is a critical factor in the continued growth of the IoT, particularly in applications making use of highly sensitive data, such as autonomous vehicles, mobile payment systems and connected health. Adding this technology to our security IP portfolio will enable the deployment of more secure devices as we drive toward our vision of a truly connected world.