Towards security limits in side-channel attacks

  • Authors:
  • F.-X. Standaert;E. Peeters;C. Archambeau;J. -J. Quisquater

  • Affiliations:
  • UCL Crypto Group, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;UCL Crypto Group, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;UCL Crypto Group, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;UCL Crypto Group, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • CHES'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper, we consider a recently introduced framework that investigates physically observable implementations from a theoretical point of view. The model allows quantifying the effect of practically relevant leakage functions with a combination of security and information theoretic metrics. More specifically, we apply our evaluation methodology to an exemplary block cipher. 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, e.g. 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.