Paper 2007/222

Towards Security Limits in Side-Channel Attacks

Francois-Xavier Standaert, Eric Peeters, Cedric Archambeau, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater

Abstract

This paper considers a recently introduced framework for the analysis of physically observable cryptographic devices. It exploits a model of computation that allows quantifying the effect of practically relevant leakage functions with a combination of security and information theoretic metrics. As a result of these metrics, a unified evaluation methodology for side-channel attacks was derived that we illustrate by applying it to an exemplary block cipher implementation. We first consider a Hamming weight leakage function and evaluate the efficiency of two commonly investigated countermeasures, namely noise addition and masking. Then, we show that the proposed methodology allows capturing certain non-trivial intuitions about the respective effectiveness of these countermeasures Finally, we justify the need of combined metrics for the evaluation, comparison and understanding of side-channel attacks.

Note: More details are available on: http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/~fstandae/tsca/

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF PS
Publication info
Published elsewhere. The paper was published in the proceedings of CHES 2006. This ePrint version contains corrected notations in order to comply with the updated notations of the model in: http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/139.
Keywords
implementationsside-channel attacksblock ciphers
Contact author(s)
fstandae @ uclouvain be
History
2008-02-08: last of 3 revisions
2007-06-08: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2007/222
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2007/222,
      author = {Francois-Xavier Standaert and Eric Peeters and Cedric Archambeau and Jean-Jacques Quisquater},
      title = {Towards Security Limits in Side-Channel Attacks},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2007/222},
      year = {2007},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2007/222}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2007/222}
}
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