A block cipher based pseudo random number generator secure against side-channel key recovery

  • Authors:
  • Christophe Petit;François-Xavier Standaert;Olivier Pereira;Tal G. Malkin;Moti Yung

  • Affiliations:
  • Université catholique de Louvain;Université catholique de Louvain;Université catholique de Louvain;Columbia University;Columbia University and Google Inc.

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Information, computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We study the security of a block cipher-based pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), both in the black box world and in the physical world, separately. We first show that the construction is a secure PRNG in the ideal cipher model. Then, we demonstrate its security against a Bayesian side-channel key recovery adversary. As a main result, we show that our construction guarantees that the success rate of the adversary does not increase with the number of physical observations, but in a limited and controlled way. Besides, we observe that, under common assumptions on side-channel attack strategies, increasing the security parameter (typically the block cipher key size) by a polynomial factor involves an increase of a side-channel attack complexity by an exponential factor, making the probability of a successful attack negligible. We believe this work provides a first interesting example of the way the algorithmic design of a cryptographic scheme influences its side-channel resistance.