Improved trace-driven cache-collision attacks against embedded AES implementations

  • Authors:
  • Jean-François Gallais;Ilya Kizhvatov;Michael Tunstall

  • Affiliations:
  • Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg;Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg;Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • WISA'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Information security applications
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In this paper we present two attacks that exploit cache events, which are visible in some side channel, to derive a secret key used in an implementation of AES. The first is an improvement of an adaptive chosen plaintext attack presented at ACISP 2006. The second is a new known plaintext attack that can recover a 128-bit key with approximately 30 measurements to reduce the number of key hypotheses to 230. This is comparable to classical Differential Power Analysis; however, our attacks are able to overcome certain masking techniques. We also show how to deal with unreliable cache event detection in the real-life measurement scenario and present practical explorations on a 32-bit ARM microprocessor.