Cache-collision side-channel analysis and attacks against AES-GCM. (15th March 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Huang, James; Li, Xiaoming
• Is Part Of: International journal of big data intelligence. Volume 7:Number 4(2021)
• Page Start: 211
• Page End: 217
• Publication Date: 2021-03-15
• Subjects: data-pattern -- cache-collision -- AES-GCM; Big data -- Periodicals; 005.705
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2053-1389

Abstract

Data security is an important issue in big data applications. The sheer data volume provides way more opportunities for a potential attacker to observe and identify patterns in computation and data. In this paper, we reveal that the data/computation patterns derived from the observation of large volume of data can be associated with the key used in the AES-GCM algorithm, one of the foundation algorithms in data security. The paper presents a software-based cache-collision timing attack against the well known authenticated encryption scheme AES-GCM. The attack can be successful if enough data (plaintext-ciphertext pairs) are processed and the hash key H used for generating look-up tables in software implementation. We present an attack model and an implementation of the attack based on OpenSSL, a widely used library that provides security-related functions for many applications. In most cases, our attack methodology is able to converge and extract the hidden key.