Today, more and more products contain electronic components that are connected to the Internet. They form the so-called Internet of Things. While this leads to unprecedented opportunities to increase productivity and convenience, this also leads to unprecedented threats. Information security is a central challenge for our society. It is crucial not only for the data that is processed in our computers but due to the IoT, information security also affects the physical world. When considering applications like autonomous driving, it even affects our physical safety.
Information security for our computing systems is provided at different levels. However, it can also be compromised at different levels of abstraction. In particular, it can also be compromised due to physical properties of a device. For example, the power consumption of a device might reveal information about the data that is processed inside a device. Also, the timing behavior of a program might leak information. An attacker may also manipulate a security mechanism of a device by shortly changing the supply voltage of a device while this security mechanism is active in a device. All these examples constitute so-called side channels. In these attacks, a physical property of a device is exploited in order to overcome a security mechanism.
The main goal of the project SOPHIA has been to research the theoretical foundations of side channel attacks and novel side channel techniques in order to find efficient and effective countermeasures that allow the execution of software without leaking information via side channels.
