Patent for Enhanced Memory Security Against Side-Channel Attacks

Photo of Yunsi Fei

ECE Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs Yunsi Fei was awarded a patent for “Methods and systems for protecting against memory-based side-channel attacks.”


Abstract Source: USPTO

Embodiments protect against memory-based side-channel attacks by efficiently shuffling data. In an example implementation, in response to a data access request by an encryption methodology regarding a first data element from amongst a plurality of data elements stored in memory, a storage address of a second data element of the plurality is determined. This storage address is determined using (i) an address of the first data element in the memory, (ii) a permutation function, and (iii) a random number. In turn, the first data element is stored at the determined storage address of the second data element and the second data element is stored at the address of the first data element. In this way, embodiments protect encryption methodologies from memory-based side-channel attacks.

Related Faculty: Yunsi Fei

Related Departments:Electrical & Computer Engineering