Paper 2016/1155

Comparative Study of Various Approximations to the Covariance Matrix in Template Attacks

Mathias Wagner, Yongbo Hu, Chen Zhang, and Yeyang Zheng

Abstract

Template attacks have been shown to be among the strongest attacks when it comes to side–channel attacks. An essential ingredient there is to calculate the inverse of a covariance matrix. In this paper we make a comparative study of the effectiveness of some 24 different variants of template attacks based on different approximations of this covariance matrix. As an example, we have chosen a recent smart card where the plain text, cipher text, as well as the key leak strongly. Some of the more commonly chosen approximations to the covariance matrix turn out to be not very effective, whilst others are.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
DESTDESTemplate AttackSide-channel AttackSmart CardSCAblock cipher
Contact author(s)
mathias wagner @ nxp com
History
2016-12-21: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/1155
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/1155,
      author = {Mathias Wagner and Yongbo Hu and Chen Zhang and Yeyang Zheng},
      title = {Comparative Study of Various Approximations to the Covariance Matrix in Template Attacks},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2016/1155},
      year = {2016},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1155}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1155}
}
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