Paper 2009/473

A Simple Power Analysis Attack on the Serpent Key Schedule

Kevin J. Compton, Brian Timm, and Joel VanLaven

Abstract

We describe an SPA attack on an 8-bit smart card implementation of the Serpent block cipher. Our attack uses measurements taken during an on-the-fly key expansion together with linearity in the cipher's key schedule algorithm to drastically reduce the search time for an initial key. An implementation finds 256-bit keys in 3.736 ms on average. Our work shows that linearity in key schedule design and other cryptographic applications should be carefully evaluated for susceptibility to side-channel attacks and that search algorithm design can greatly speed up side-channel attacks.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF PS
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords
SerpentSPAPower AttackLinearityBlock Cipher
Contact author(s)
kjc @ umich edu
History
2009-09-26: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2009/473
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2009/473,
      author = {Kevin J.  Compton and Brian Timm and Joel VanLaven},
      title = {A Simple Power Analysis Attack on the Serpent Key Schedule},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2009/473},
      year = {2009},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/473}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/473}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.