SCARE of an Unknown Hardware Feistel Implementation

  • Authors:
  • Denis Réal;Vivien Dubois;Anne-Marie Guilloux;Frédéric Valette;Mhamed Drissi

  • Affiliations:
  • CELAR, Bruz, France 35 and INSA-IETR, Rennes, France 35043;CELAR, Bruz, France 35;CELAR, Bruz, France 35;CELAR, Bruz, France 35;INSA-IETR, Rennes, France 35043

  • Venue:
  • CARDIS '08 Proceedings of the 8th IFIP WG 8.8/11.2 international conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Physical attacks based on Side Channel Analysis (SCA) or on Fault Analysis (FA) target a secret usually manipulated by a public algorithm. SCA can also be used for Reverse Engineering (SCARE) against the software implementation of a private algorithm. In this paper, we claim that an unknown Feistel scheme with an hardware design can be recovered with a chosen plaintexts SCA attack. First, we show that whatever is the input of the unknown Feistel function, its one-round output can be guessed by SCA. Using this relation, two attacks for recovering the algorithm are proposed : an expensive interpolation attack on a generic Feistel scheme and an improved attack on a specific but commonly used scheme. Then, a countermeasure is proposed.