An Enhanced SHA3-based Hashing Method: A Side-channel attack countermeasure

When a software implementation of a security system is considered, side channel attacks are on the spot threat. Side-channel attacks, considered in this work, are a class of physical attacks in which an adversary tries to exploit physical information leakages such as timing information, power consumption, or electromagnetic radiation to estimate security system parameters during performing security algorithms. New system architecture features, such as larger cache sizes and multicore processors, have increased the prevalence of side channels, in addition to, the availability of measurement apparatuses to an attacker. Thus, software developers must be aware of the potential for side-channel attacks and plan appropriately. In this paper, we propose a software implementation of a hashing method based on SHA3-512 hashing algorithm that can counteract the side-channel attacks. To achieve our goal, we use three techniques, first, we shuffle the dataset, salt, and process selector arrays using "Fisher Yates" algorithm. Second, we use volatile memory objects to hold critical data. Finally, we apply the thread locking technique where at most one thread can access the critical objects at a time. Experimental results show that our proposed hashing method is more secure than other related methods. Although there is a trade-off between hashing security and hashing processing time, the processing time of the proposed hashing method is still acceptable.